According to Dr. Dinh Van Luong, Director of the Central Lung Hospital, the Vitimes, which was developed by the National TB Programme in 2010, has been run in the 63 cities and provinces nationwide as well as more than 900 medical facilities at the district level.

Its main function is to manage important reports and data of the National TB Programme, serving monitoring, supervision, scientific research, planning, and decision making.

However, the data on Vitimes is mainly about susceptible TB with a shortage of components on drug-resistant TB, latent TB, contact management as well as a lack of connection and data exchange with other systems such as those of the Vietnam Social Security, hospital management software (HIS), electronic information system of the HIV Programme or test data management software of the National TB Programme, said Luong.

Since 2019, the USAID has worked with the National TB Programme to support the Vietnamese Government to detect, treat and detect, report people with undetected TB in the community, with the upgrading of the Vitimes to supervise the National TB Programme in a comprehensive manner.

The upgraded Vitimes is a comprehensive electronic information system on TB, fully integrated with subsystems, including data modules, detection management, treatment of susceptible TB, drug-resistant TB and latent TB.

The upgrading of the system helps the National TB Programme standardise the management and monitoring system, making it ready to exchange data with many other systems at present and in the future, facilitating the management, provision and analysis of data, thus ensuring that decisions are made in a more timely and accurate way.

USAID's Mission Director for Vietnam Aler Grubbs said that in the future, the agency and the National TB Programme will continue to team up to ensure that all levels in the TB prevention and control system from the central level to provinces, districts and communes have sufficient capacity to reach vulnerable community groups and provide high-quality healthcare services to the needy.

This is also USAID's commitment to support Vietnam in maintaining TB control, aiming to reduce the TB incidence rate by 90% and the TB fatality rate by 95% compared to 2015, ensuring that no households have to bear the costs of disasters caused by TB, moving towards the goal of ending TB by 2035.