Can a digital tablet cut back a country's overuse of antibiotics?
#antibiotics #overprescribing #Rwanda #digital tablet #antibiotic resistance #health technology #prescription rates
📌 Key Takeaways
- A digital tablet tool is being introduced in Rwanda to reduce antibiotic overprescribing.
- Overprescribing antibiotics contributes to the global issue of antibiotic resistance.
- Rwanda has been identified as having a notably high rate of antibiotic prescriptions.
- The initiative aims to improve prescribing practices through technological intervention.
📖 Full Retelling
Overprescribing antibiotics breeds antibiotic resistance. A new tool aims to lower a notably high rate of such prescriptions in Rwanda. (Image credit: Magali Rochat)
🏷️ Themes
Public Health, Technology
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Rwanda
Country in East Africa
Rwanda, officially the Republic of Rwanda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Known as the "Land of a Thousand Hills" for its high elevation and rolling terrain, its geography is dominated by mountains in the west and savanna in the southeast. The largest and most notable lakes are mainly in th...
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Global Health Can a digital tablet cut back a country's overuse of antibiotics? March 5, 2026 2:19 PM ET By Jonathan Lambert A mother and child at a health center in Rwanda. The child's condition was assessed by a nurse using the new ePOCT+ digital tablet (at the corner of the table), aimed at reducing the overuse of antibiotics. Magali Rochat hide caption toggle caption Magali Rochat During a typical day at a clinic in rural Rwanda, nurses can see 60 patients a day. Adults and children line up with injuries, coughs and fevers, often after traveling many miles. "Nurses are very busy, they're receiving all the things from the community, complicated or easy," says Dr. Victor Pacifique Rwandarwacu, a physician from Rwanda. That leaves little time for diagnosis. When faced with a patient suffering from an illness, many nurses err on the side of prescribing something. Often, that's antibiotics. "You find them giving a high number of antibiotics, just in case," says Rwandarwacu. "They'd be like, 'OK, what if I don't give it, and then the patient comes back tonight?'" That dynamic has led to extremely high prescription rates, according to new research by Rwandarwacu and his colleagues. Across 32 clinics in Rwanda, 71% of pediatric visits ended with an antibiotic prescription. That's likely much, much higher than necessary. For a given patient, getting antibiotics for, say, a viral case of pneumonia may not be a big deal, even though antibiotics do nothing to stop the virus. But across a region or country, such high rates of unnecessary prescriptions can breed resistance . "In sub-Saharan Africa, the rise in antimicrobial resistance is enormous," says Jean Claude Semuto Ngabonziza, a researcher at the Rwanda Biomedical Center who was also involved in the study. "We are at the edge of losing potential antibiotics." But Ngabonziza, Rwandarwacu and their colleagues have developed a new tool that could help. Their computer tablet-based tool, called ePOCT+, guides clinicians, st...
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