UNLABELLED Background Despite the availability of testing and treatment, bacterial sexually transmissible infections (STIs) continue to occur at endemic levels in many remote Indigenous communities in Australia. New generation molecular point-of-care (POC) tests have high sensitivity, comparable with conventional diagnostic tests, and have the potential to increase the impact of STI screening. ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate two alternatives to the fasting plasma glucose (FPG) test for diabetes screening in Latin America. METHODS Eight hundred adults without diabetes were recruited in a primary care clinic in Honduras. An equation-based screening formula, incorporating a random capillary glucose test and other risk factors, was used for initial screening. All patients with a screening-based ...

The emergence of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics specifically designed for low-resource settings coupled with the rapid increase in need for routine care of patients with chronic diseases should prompt reconsideration of how health care can be delivered most beneficially and cost-effectively in developing countries. Bolstering support for primary care to provide rapid and appropriate integrated...

The study and the implementation of an adaptive service for multimedia streams based on Partial Order and partial reliability Connections (POC) is presented in this paper. A POC connection provides a service authorized to support both bounded losses and bounded disorder. Such parameters can be used to accurately define the range of conditions over which an adaptive application can perform accep...

In this article we present the preliminary operationalization of the Project’s Information System (PRIS) with the help of Gareis’s (1996) “New Management Paradigm“. PRIS is project group’s own information system, which is tightly connected to the Project-Oriented Company’s (POC) ISs. In order to reveal the POC environment’s characteristics, we present a case study of the process of procurement ...

This paper identifies and analyses characteristics of Patients’ Online Communities (POC) in Sweden. The purpose of the paper is to increase our understanding of how individuals design online social support and how this can inform design in a wider perspective. The study presents a fine-grained picture of POC covering both the contextual structures and the community culture. Two important drivin...

INTRODUCTION Early infant diagnosis (EID) and prompt linkage to care are critical to minimise the high morbidity and mortality associated with infant HIV infection. Attrition in the "EID cascade" is common; however, point-of-care (POC) EID assays with same-day result could facilitate prompt linkage of HIV-infected infant to treatment. Despite a number of POC EID assays in development, few have ...

INTRODUCTION Poor healthcare access is a major barrier to receiving antenatal care and a cause of high maternal mortality in South Africa (SA). 'Point-of-care' (POC) diagnostics is a powerful emerging healthcare approach to improve healthcare access. This study focuses on evaluating the accessibility and utility of POC diagnostics for maternal health in rural SA primary healthcare (PHC) clinics...

BACKGROUND Monitoring of HIV viral load in patients on combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) is not generally available in resource-limited settings. We examined the cost-effectiveness of qualitative point-of-care viral load tests (POC-VL) in sub-Saharan Africa. DESIGN Mathematical model based on longitudinal data from the Gugulethu and Khayelitsha township ART programmes in Cape Town, Sou...

The process of translating a basic scientific discovery into a novel therapeutic that improves public health is immensely gratifying. A particularly exciting time in the translation process is the early clinical testing to assess—for the first time—whether a novel molecule is efficacious in humans. This “proof-of-concept” (POC) stage of translation has a high risk of failure and must be careful...