Accelerating Delivery of rheUmatic heart disease preventive iNterventions in Uganda (ADUNU)

Our objective is to partner with the Ugandan government to test a novel community-based program, ADUNU (Acholi for “heart”) that aims to find individuals with RHD and provide secondary prevention close to where they live. The program will be tested in two districts (one demonstration, one replication), building a foundation for national scale-up beyond the proposed research. ADUNU is based on two core, evidence-based technologies, (1) RHD testing using handheld echocardiography in community settings and (2) nurse-led, registry-based delivery of secondary prevention. ADUNU is a non-randomized experiment that will set up a new system in settings where RHD-related healthcare currently does not exist, with the goal of finding new cases and enrolling them in local registries that provide secondary prevention.