Diarrheal diseases claim 1.5 million lives annually and remain one of the leading causes of death and disability in both children and adults worldwide. Appropriate rehydration with either oral or intravenous fluids remains the most important step for treating acute diarrhea, and necessitates an accurate assessment of dehydration status.

Since 2018, Dr. Levine and his research team derived and internally validated new clinical diagnostic models for dehydration severity both in children under five years of age and patients over five years of age. They successfully demonstrated that their diagnostic models were more accurate and reliable than the World Health Organization guidelines, currently the standard of care for managing acute diarrhea in most settings worldwide. These models were incorporated into a simple mobile health application clinical decision support tool (mHealth CDST) that can be used by frontline providers to guide management for patients with acute diarrhea.

This R01 renewal award research will externally validate the accuracy, reliability, and clinical utility of their novel mHealth CDST in Tanzania, a high diarrheal burden setting. In addition, they will use an implementation science-based approach to better understand the barriers and facilitators to uptake and usage of the mHealth CDST by a variety of different types of healthcare providers in Tanzania.

Once validated, their tool has the potential to reduce both the morbidity and mortality that occurs as a result of missed diagnoses of dehydration, as well as the adverse events and inappropriate utilization of limited healthcare resources that can result from inaccurate diagnoses of dehydration. This can potentially improve treatment for the hundreds of millions of patients presenting to healthcare facilities worldwide with acute diarrhea each year.

To read more about the study, please see the NIH Reporter as well as our Research page.