eCompliance – empowering people. Network

eCompliance has been rolled out to nearly 50,000 TB patients in nine countries.
The technology tracks drug adherence among TB patients.
Fingerprint or an iris scan helps track meetings between patients and community healthcare workers.
To date, the system has recorded over 2.25 million transactions.
Operation ASHA covers the last mile in service delivery for patients.

eCompliance offers finger and iris scan capabilities to ensure that patients comply with their prescription medicine regiment.

Key Features

eCompliance is a biometric tracking technology. Whenever a patient takes a dose, visits a center or meets a community healthcare worker (CHW), both have to give their fingerprint or an iris scan. This registers their presence/meeting, time and GPS location. The application sends the data to a central server regularly. There is real time information if a patient has missed a dose so that the CHW can immediately follow up and visit the patient to administer the medicine. This ensures that every dose is taken, thus ‘turning the tap off’ on drug resistant tuberculosis (TB). eCompliance has been rolled out for nearly 50,000 TB patients in nine countries. It has recorded over 2.25 million transactions.

Social Impact

This application was developed to improve the treatment success rate of TB patients. Evidence in support of Operation ASHA’s model and technology:

Harvard Business School and the World Bank completed a randomized controlled trial (RCT) on effectiveness of eCompliance technology recently. They found the drop-out rate (or default, which leads to drug-resistance) is lower by 25% among patients treated with eCompliance, compared to others. This was a large, rigorous RCT involving thousands of patients in four states in India. It lasted for three years.

The Country Director of the World Bank in India wrote that “If Operation ASHA could be rolled out everywhere TB is, we could stop multi-drug-resistant TB and save so many lives. What Operation ASHA does is bridge the gap for the elusive last mile in service delivery – the mile that lies in between well-intended government programs and results on the ground. And they do it with relentless focus and incredible efficiency. What if we could develop Operation ASHA for other problems as well. It would be incredible.”