Efficiency of an intervention package for arterial hypertension comprising telemanagement in a Cameroonian rural setting: The TELEMED-CAM study
Open accessAbstract
INTRODUCTION: Sub-Saharan Africa has a disproportionate burden of disease and an extreme shortage of health workforce. Therefore, adequate care for emerging chronic diseases can be very challenging. We implemented and evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention package comprising telecare as a mean for improving the outcomes of care for hypertension in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS: The study involved a telemedicine center based at the Yaounde General Hospital (5 cardiologists) in the Capital city of Cameroon, and 30 remote rural health centers within the vicinity of Yaoundé (20 centers (103 patients) in the usual care group, and 10 centers (165 patients) in the intervention groups). The total duration of the intervention was 24 weeks. RESULTS: Participants in the intervention group had higher baseline systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure, and included fewer individuals with diabetes than those in the usual care group (all p < 0.01). Otherwise, the baseline profile was mostly similar between the two groups. During follow-up, more participants in the intervention groups achieved optimal BP control, driven primarily by greater improvement of BP control among High risk participants (hypertension stage III) in the intervention group. CONCLUSION: An intervention package comprising tele-support to general practitioners and nurses is effective in improving the management and outcome of care for hypertension in rural underserved populations. This can potentially help in addressing the shortage of trained health workforce for chronic disease management in some settings. However context-specific approaches and cost-effectiveness data are needed to improve the application of telemedicine for chronic disease management in resource-limited settings.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
It is technically feasible to expand routine availability of prenatal ultrasound to populations with restricted access to this service.
“It is technically feasible to expand routine availability of prenatal ultrasound to populations with restricted access to this service.”
From Current evidence on the use of mHealth approaches in Sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review (2023) · cites this paper as [65]
The Introduction and Discussion address telemedicine for hypertension and cardiovascular care in rural Cameroon, not prenatal ultrasound. The Methods (Participants and power calculation; page unavailable) exclude pregnant women. Searches for prenatal ultrasound and antenatal sonography found no passage addressing whether routine ultrasound access could be expanded. (LLM, conf=0.78)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredAlmost all included studies highlighted that mHealth interventions facilitate access to previously unavailable services.
“In fact, almost all included studies highlighted this characteristic feature of mHealth interventions [20, 36–51].”
From A realist review of mobile phone-based health interventions for non-communicable disease management in sub-Saharan Africa (2017) · cites this paper as [42]
An important feature of most mHealth interventions was that interactions between participants usually took place on the basis of standardized information exchange protocols.
“An important feature of most mHealth interventions was that interactions between participants usually took place on the basis of standardized information exchange protocols [36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45–47, 49, 52, 54].”
From A realist review of mobile phone-based health interventions for non-communicable disease management in sub-Saharan Africa (2017) · cites this paper as [42]
In 12 included studies, mHealth interventions essentially consisted of mobile phone-based consultations between two healthcare providers, where a specialized provider could be reached by another provider, indirectly improving patient access to specialized care.
“In 12 studies, mHealth interventions essentially consisted of mobile phone-based consultations between two healthcare providers, where a specialized provider could be reached by another provider, thus indirectly improving patient access to specialized care [36, 38–43, 45, 47–49, 52].”
From A realist review of mobile phone-based health interventions for non-communicable disease management in sub-Saharan Africa (2017) · cites this paper as [42]
First-contact providers found mobile phone technologies easy to use if they were simple, relevant, and essentially combined local content and language.
“First-contact providers found mobile phone technologies easy to use if they were simple, relevant, and essentially combined local content and language [42].”
From A realist review of mobile phone-based health interventions for non-communicable disease management in sub-Saharan Africa (2017) · cites this paper as [42]
If patients faced access barriers such as long travel times, waiting times, and high travel costs, mHealth interventions were perceived to be useful.
“If patients faced access barriers such as long travel times, waiting times, and high travel costs, mHealth interventions were perceived to be useful [20, 42, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 53, 55].”
From A realist review of mobile phone-based health interventions for non-communicable disease management in sub-Saharan Africa (2017) · cites this paper as [42]
For patients, availability of a functioning stable telecommunications network was one of the two most important enabling resources necessary for a mHealth intervention to be perceived useful.
“For patients, unsurprisingly, the two most important enabling resources necessary for a mHealth intervention to be (perceived to be) useful were access to mobile phones [37, 45, 46, 50, 53–55] (also possible through borrowing [46, 50]) and the availability of a functioning stable telecommunications network [20, 36, 39, 42, 45, 47, 48, 52, 55].”
From A realist review of mobile phone-based health interventions for non-communicable disease management in sub-Saharan Africa (2017) · cites this paper as [42]
First-contact providers reported that mHealth could contribute to overcoming barriers to accessing supervision.
“Furthermore, (first-contact) providers reported that they needed support in order to follow guidelines [50, 54, 55] and that mHealth could contribute to overcoming barriers to accessing supervision [37, 40–42, 47, 51].”
From A realist review of mobile phone-based health interventions for non-communicable disease management in sub-Saharan Africa (2017) · cites this paper as [42]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 27 · Cited by 38
- Authors
- Kingue, S., Angandji, P., Menanga, A. P., Ashutantang, G., Sobngwi, E., Dossou-Yovo, R. A., Kaze, F., Kengne, A. P., Dzudie, A., Ndobo, P., & Muna, W.
- Affiliations
- Yaoundé General Hospital (CM)
- South African Medical Research Council (ZA)
- Central Hospital of Yaoundé (CM)
- ORCID
- Kengne, André Pascal
- Venue
- Pan African Medical Journal
- Publisher
- Pan African Medical Journal
- Published
- 2013
- Volume
- 15
- Pages
- 153-153
- ISSN
- 1937-8688 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3880813
- OpenAlex
- W2148724875
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 3 · 2017: 6 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 1.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Pan African Medical Journal (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Sanofi
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Telemedicine and Telehealth Implementation
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine › Blood Pressure and Hypertension Studies
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Mobile Health and mHealth Applications
- Keywords
- hypertension, telemedicine, telecare, blood pressure control, rural health care, chronic disease management, health workforce shortage, general practitioners, nurses, resource-limited settings, Cameroon
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Aged, Cameroon, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Female, Health Plan Implementation, Humans, Hypertension, Male, Middle Aged, Rural Population, Program Evaluation, Telemedicine
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
