Making every minute count.

In Kenya, HP's Early Infant Diagnosis project is helping to diagnose and treat HIV faster than ever.

In Kenya, more than 120,000 newborns are born infected with HIV every year. Early diagnosis is crucial to keeping these children alive, but if treatment is delayed more than half will die before they reach their second birthday.

Partnering with the Kenyan government and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), HP launched the Early Infant Diagnosis (EID) project to help reduce the time between an infant's blood test and diagnosis. Instead of taking up to four months for test results to travel round trip by mail to one of four national laboratories and back, blood samples are now collected at over 100,000 local health centers, analyzed, and recorded in a database at one of five central state-of-the-art HP data centers. Once processed, test results are made available online or are sent via e-mail or SMS-enabled HP printers to health clinics nationwide.

This innovative effort has made the transmission of results faster and more reliable—a huge improvement that has helped speed early treatment to more than 65,000 infants in 2011 alone. As part of the HP worldwide Strengthening Health Systems initiative and partnership with CHAI and the Kenyan government, they have created a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem.

"Partnering with a global leader in health, such as the Clinton Health Access Initiative, we bring answers and solutions that help the ministry of health — ultimately help those infants and their families", said Aziz Mohamed, Health Initiatives Manager at HP.

For children born under the specter of HIV, every minute matters.