A Point-of-Care Method with Integrated Decision Support Tool to Estimate Anemia at Population Level

Anemia is a major public health problem in India. Screen and treat approach is considered to be a promising strategy for tackling anemia. However, there are no methods established so far which could make this possible at the point of care.

We tried to establish a point-of-care method for hemoglobin estimation. This we also tried to integrate this method into a custom software, which decides whether a participant is anemic or not, and based on the hemoglobin levels, the inbuilt algorithm in the software also guides the treatment, and all this happens within a few seconds. Using this protocol, we can obtain accurate results on hemoglobin estimation while reducing turnaround time of test results.

This will enable rapid decision making on the initiation of treatment. Moreover, it would result in improved intervention delivery. This integrated method can be used as a job aid for the medical staff to decide on IFA treatment at the healthcare facility.

It can also be adopted for any field-level service or intervention programs that involve Hb testing. Going forward, we would like to compare our method with other invasive and non-invasive methods of hemoglobin estimation which are available at point of care. We would also like to investigate the cost-effectiveness of our method in the field setting.