Hewlett-Packard has announced an alliance with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Kenya Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation to provide technological support to improve testing and treatment methods for infants in Kenya exposed to HIV.

HP will provide five data centers connected with four existing laboratories, including $1 million in servers, storage, computers, networking equipment, SMS-enabled printers, and local IT training to support the program. Within their first year of operation, the centers are expected to process approximately 70,000 early infant diagnosis test results and provide real-time medical data to health practitioners throughout Kenya.

The early infant HIV diagnosis system will provide test results in one to two days, a significant improvement on the previous paper-based system that could take two to three months to provide results. Early detection is critical to HIV infant survival rate, as such infants must begin anti-retroviral treatment as quickly as possible to ensure survival. According to the Kenyan health ministry, without treatment half of HIV-positive children there are unlikely to survive past the age of 2.

In addition, HP will provide financial and consultative support to students at the Nairobi-based Strathmore University who have developed software to improve the tracking process and make test results available online and via SMS-GSM-enabled printers. The system also will scale-up to support the Kenyan health ministry as it expands prevention of mother-to-child transmission services to more than three thousand facilities during the next two years.

"Technology and innovation are key to solving many of the most pressing challenges of our world, none of which are more urgent than a disease which takes the lives of thirty-one children every minute," said former President Clinton. "I'm pleased HP's technology and expertise will enable the partnership with CHAI to save the lives of more than 100,000 infants in Kenya each year, and in the process, demonstrate how the private sector can and should operate in the developing world."