Personal digital assistants to collect tuberculosis bacteriology data in Peru reduce delays, errors, and workload, and are acceptable to users: cluster randomized controlled trial

Peruvian laboratory structure, and workflow of the bacteriology data collection team with the current paper system (white lines) and with the PDA-based system (red lines).

PDA form example.

Decision support page within the web-based medical record system, PIH-EMR, to automate verification and cross-checking of smear and culture results collected by the bacteriology team.

Cluster randomized controlled trial scheme with within-districts (before and after) and between-districts comparisons.

Definition of processing time.

Box plot for processing time of (a) cultures and (b) smears in log scale (left y-axis) and days (right y-axis). These show that for both culture and smear results there was a statistically significant decrease (p<0.001) in the processing time with the PDA-based system (intervention districts after) compared to the same districts before the implementation (intervention districts before) and districts with the paper-based system (control districts after). The Kaplan–Meier survival curves for the initial 100 days for (c) culture and (d) smear microscopy show that the PDA-based system was able to drastically decrease the number of outlying results with a processing time of over 90 days.