Digital Risk Staging for HIV

Project Summary

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.