Developing an Interprofessional Collaboration Model Based Telecare to Improving Adherence and Therapy Outcomes for Tuberculosis Patients

Optimal treatment for Tuberculosis (TB) required a multidisciplinary team, but such conditions were not observed in most hospitals. This study aimed to develop a telecare service based on interprofessional collaboration to enhance medication adherence and therapy outcomes for TB patients. The research was conducted in three phases: Phase 1 was cross-sectional, Phase 2 was qualitative using the focus group discussion (FGD) method, and Phase 3 was a single-blind Randomized Control Trial. The study population consisted of all outpatient TB patients at Husada Prima Hospital in Surabaya. A simple random sampling method was used, with 188 patients in Phase 1 and 100 patients in Phase 3 (50 patients per group). The instruments used included the MARS-5, CPAT, TRAM, and SGRQ questionnaires. Data were analyzed to examine the effect of the intervention model using the Mann-Whitney test. There was a significant difference between the knowledge scores of the control and experimental groups, with a p-value of 0.007 (p < 0.05). The experimental group showed a higher median score (76.92) compared to the control group (61.54). Significant differences were also observed in the medication adherence variable between the control and experimental groups (p = 0.008, p < 0.05). In the experimental group, 50 patients demonstrated higher medication adherence (median score 25.00), compared to the control group, which showed lower adherence. Regarding patients’ quality of life, a significant difference was observed between the two groups, with a p-value of 0.001 (p < 0.05). The control group had a higher median quality of life score (35.67) compared to the experimental group (25.45). Overall, the study concluded that telecare-based interprofessional collaboration had a positive impact on improving knowledge, medication adherence, quality of life in TB patients and covertion BTA.

Keywords: Interprofessional collaboration; Telecare; Tuberculosis