Experts from Medanta, Apollo Medical College, Yashoda Super Specialty, Amrita, The Union, and the Union Health Ministry convened in Delhi to discuss how to reduce the burden of tuberculosis, which the Indian government has pledged to eradicate by 2025.

The goal of this brainstorming session was to encourage private hospitals to actively participate in TB screening and to assist the state in closing the TB care service gap.

The hospitals were encouraged to support the national initiative by implementing the 'Active Case Finding' model of tuberculosis detection championed by Medanta for many years.

Mr Rajender P Joshi, Deputy Director General of Central TB Division, Union Health Ministry announced the private hospitals’ engagement program.

Speaking to Drug Today Medical Times about the model of Active Case Finding’, Dr Bornali Datta, Director, Department of Respiratory and Sleep Medicine, Medanta Gurugram, said, “When we decide that we have to eliminate the disease like we did polio. We have to go door to door. Patients will not come to the hospitals. In fact, you have to go to them and screen them. We have shown our Active Case Finding Model where we (Medanta healthcare workers) with Asha workers went door to door and identified patients.”

“These patients were referred to sub-centres. Our team has a dedicated sub-centre which diagnoses and starts further treatment of them. In the last five months, we have identified an additional 150 active cases. These patients could not access healthcare services,” Dr Datta added.

Using Medanta’s active-case finding methodology, its community health workers and village-level grassroots health workers (Asha)s regularly conduct door-to-door screenings to detect individuals at potential risk, For on-spot diagnosis, they use sputum analysis, digital chest-X ray and an artificial intelligence-based tool (Aure.AI) followed by a highly-advanced confirmatory molecular-diagnostic test (GeneXpert),

All these diagnostic facilities are available in dedicated mobile vans that travel to villages as part of the Mission.

Confirmed TB cases are referred to government hospitals for initiation of DOTS (Directly Observed Therapy Short) course therapy.

The block-level screenings, being done as cluster randomized control trials, have defined an effective model for finding active cases.