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Cell phones help doctors collect data in new ways

Physicians and nurses in Peru are using wireless phones to capture, store and transmit medical information in a research project.

By Tyler Chin, amednews staff. Feb. 21, 2005.

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Can you hear me now?

Loud and clear. So much so that physicians and nurses in parts of Peru have been using cell phones since September 2004 to capture and record patient files in real time as part of a larger public health surveillance pilot project designed to lower the rate of sexually transmitted diseases.

Walter H. Curioso, MD, a primary care physician in Peru who's pursuing a master's degree in public health and a certificate in biomedical and health informatics at the University of Washington in Seattle, came up with the idea to use the cell phones because "right now in Peru they are very popular and also pretty cheap," Dr. Curioso said. "If you go to Peru, even the street vendors have a cell phone."

So, he wondered if cell phones could be used as a tool to improve data quality and streamline the collection and processing of data.

"In the past, health care workers would use a paper-based system to record adverse events, and this information could take weeks or months to reach the doctors," he said. "Now, the health workers can transmit the information faster and [project] team leaders can potentially make real-time decisions."

Those doctors also are seeing more accurate data because those data are stored directly into an online database. Before, those data had to be manually entered into a computer, said Dr. Curioso, who co-designed and is leading the cell phone public health surveillance project.

That project is part of PREVEN, a large randomized trial involving the collection of STD data in 20 cities by organized groups including Dr. Curioso's employer, the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, the University of Washington, and the Imperial College of London, in collaboration with Peru's Ministry of Health.