HIVSmart!
Team members: Angela, Cindy, Roni, and Ashlyn
With COVID-19 disruptions in HIV service delivery, effective strategies to diagnose people living with HIV, given limited resources, are now more than ever necessary to reach these targets. An important strategy to optimise screening is risk staging, that is, evaluating the risk of an HIV infection prior to screening to offer targeted HIV testing to populations that are disproportionately affected by HIV. Risk staging can not only improve the efficiency of HIV screening services, but it can also increase test uptake and raise awareness with respect to high-risk behaviours. The Pant Pai lab is currently assessing predictors of HIV infection in townships of South Africa to develop and validate a digital risk assessment tool which can accurately predict new HIV infections.
Impact of a personalised, digital, HIV self-testing app-based program on linkages and new infections in the township populations of South Africa: https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/9/e006032
An Unsupervised Smart App–Optimized HIV Self-Testing Program in Montreal, Canada: Cross-Sectional Study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6290269/
Empowering Patients
Dr Nitika Pant Pai – “My team and I created an open-source smartphone application and HIV self-test that can save time and increase screening, counseling and treatment rates. There is so much energy in giving knowledge and sharing knowledge. Knowledge only grows by sharing. That is the beauty of Open Access. It will grow, it has grown and there is great momentum.”