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| Project M-Health | ||
Leadership: United States- Ingrid Bassett MD, MPH Collaborators: Funding sources: |
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| Although there are more than 4,000 voluntary counseling and testing sites in South Africa, only 30% of South Africans report every having been tested for HIV.
Dr. Krista Dong, an MGH physician based at Edendale Hospital in Petermaritzburg, South Africa, has developed a novel program called Project Masiluleke, or Project M (Masiluleke means "to give wise counsel" and "lend a helping hand" in Zulu). The goal of this program is to increase awareness of HIV testing via social marketing using the SMS Text "please call me" system. "Please call me" is a common cellular phone tool in which individuals without airtime send a free SMS text to ask someone to call them. Several international cellular carriers sell the extra text fields on each SMS text for advertising. Eighty percent of South Africans have a cell phone, almost all pay-as-you go customers who send a combined 30-million ‘please call me’ text messages every day. Project M exploits the 120 unused characters in the ‘please call me’ messages, and inserts key HIV and TB messages that direct recipients to call the free National AIDS Helpline. Since October 2008, Krista Dong and her colleagues, in collaboration with MTN, have sent one million HIV-TB messages per day, which has resulted in a sustained 300% increased of calls to the AIDS Helpline. While this project is in its infancy, researchers at UKZN, MGH, Harvard and MIT hope to leverage existing wireless technology to encourage home testing as well as refer and retain patients.
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