Implementation of a Distributed System to Collect, Search and Manage Data of Patients with Leprosy in Hiperendemic Municipalities

— The state of Pará, in Brazil, with 2,351 new cases of leprosy reported in 2017, has an annual detection coefficient of 30/100,000 inhabitants, conferring it the classification of a hyperendemic state. A research group at a university in Belém, capital of Pará, develops a research work where a medical team do household visits to individuals who have been diagnosed with leprosy. The objective of this work is to present a distributed computer system that helped the team to collect and analyze the patient's data without the need of printed medical records. The system is composed of four components: a database, a mobile application, a server application and a reports application. Tests on the system were made by the team while doing their research. Patient's data were collected from three municipalities in the state of Pará. From the feedback provided by the team, there was a reduction in their costs by not having to use printed forms and reduction in the delay of having the data ready to be analyzed, since it was being registered directly in digital format. In total, the system was used to store data of 1101 individuals, of which 276 are leprosy patients and 825 are contacts of these patients. 149 new cases were diagnosed that had not been notified prior to the team’s visit. Among these 149, 48 are under the age of 15; 122 have type multibacillary (MB) and 27 type paucibacillary (PB) leprosy.