Costing data for implementing mHealth facilitated tuberculosis contact tracing in Uganda

Introduction
Mobile health (mHealth) applications may improve timely access to health services and improve patient-provider communication, but the upfront costs of implementation may be prohibitive, especially in resource-limited settings.
Methods
We measured the costs of developing and implementing an mHealth-facilitated, home-based strategy for tuberculosis (TB) contact investigation (CI) in Kampala, Uganda, between February 2014 and July 2017. We compared routine implementation involving community health workers (CHWs) screening and referring household contacts to clinics for TB evaluation to home-based HIV testing and sputum collection and transport with test results delivered by automated short messaging services (SMS) We carried out key informant interviews with CHWs and asked them to complete time-and-motion surveys. We estimated program costs from the Ugandan health system perspective, using top-down and bottom-up (components-based) approaches. We estimated total costs per conta...