About 60% of all newborn infants will develop neonatal jaundice in the first week after birth. In most newborns, jaundice is physiological and clears spontaneously over the first few days, but a significant proportion will require treatment to avoid a persistently high level of bilirubin (hyperbilirubinaemia). Severe hyperbiliribinaemia may lead to brain damage (kernicterus), death and lifelong impairment. It is the most significant and preventable risk factor for cerebral palsy in Ghana. These complications of hyperbiliribinaemia are largely preventable with effective screening to achieve timely diagnosis and treatment. Subjective visual inspection of the eye and skin is the standard screening process in low-resource countries, but it is confounded by skin pigmentation and ambient light, and is particularly difficult for untrained individuals such as community health workers and parents. High-income countries recommend against relying solely on visual identification for diagnosis of neonatal jaundice. Available screening methods are expensive, invasive, and not usually accessible at the point of care in low-resource settings. Affordable, portable and reliable tools for screening newborns for jaundice are needed to tackle the burden of death and disability from neonatal jaundice.
The overall aim of the project is to develop a smartphone app for screening jaundiced newborns. The specific objectives of this study are to systematically assess the implementation of the smartphone app into routine clinical practice at the postnatal ward of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the smartphone app screening tool in clinical practice.
Expected Duration: 2020 – 2021
Co-Principal Investigator: Dr. Ama Pokuaa Fenny