Community empowerment through technology-enabled health education for tuberculosis control

Tuberculosis is one of the major infectious diseases that result in a significant morbidity and mortality, especially in the resource-limited communities with a lack of health literacy that hinders the early detection and the compliance with the treatment. Health education through technology is an up-and-coming method of bettering community empowerment in the TB control programs. In this paper, the researcher compared the robustness of a holistic technology-based health education framework using interventions of mobile applications, interactive voice response systems, and digital kiosks in communities to empower the communities with TB. The study was a cluster-randomized controlled trial in 24 communities (12 intervention and 12 control) and used on 1847 adults above 12 months. The main outcomes were TB knowledge levels, health-seeking behavior levels, community-engagement levels, and TB case detection rates. Community empowerment was conceptualized as a multidimensional construct encompassing knowledge acquisition, proactive health-seeking behavior, collective engagement, and stigma reduction. Findings showed that communities that were equipped with technology scored higher in terms of TB knowledge (76.8 ± 12.4 vs. 52.3 ± 14.7, p < 0.001) and index of health-seeking behavior (3.82 ± 0.67 vs. 2.41 ± 0.84, p < 0.001) than control communities. The score of community engagement in intervention communities scored 156 percent higher than in controls, which scored 23 percent higher. It is interesting to note that the rate of TB cases detection in the intervention communities was 34.2 percent as opposed to 8.7 percent in the control community (p = 0.002). The platform that had been enabled by the technology proved to be very effective when it came to empowering communities to undertake the TB control process and provided a model that could be expanded to enable the introduction of digital health education into the public health programs aimed at protecting against the spread of infectious diseases in the endemic areas.