PID Care

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Anchor lead: Can texting and home visits help young women manage pelvic inflammatory disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Pelvic inflammatory disease or PID is an infection in women that can result in infertility if not treated. Now research by Maria Trent, an adolescent medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, shows that an approach using text messaging and a home visit from a nurse can help assure the infection is treated.

Trent: One of the things we have to do is to support patients in how they care for themselves at home after they leave the doctor’s office, particularly young women. It’s important because PID is associated with chronic pelvic pain, ectopic pregnancy, and tubal infertility. We actually thought that one of the ways we could support patients was to provide technology enhanced community health nursing. We found that patients in our study were 86 times more likely to receive care, that short term follow up visit per CDC recommendation, than those people who were in the control arm.  :32

Trent hopes to deploy the program widely. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.