#FightCOVID19 : a platform monitoring patients diagnosed with COVID-19-like symptoms
The COVID-19 epidemic is threatening to overwhelm health systems in most Western countries. It is therefore essential to put in place solutions other than in-hospital quarantine for all infected patients.
It is in this context that Professor Philippe Ravaud — University of Paris, Inserm UMR 1153, Clinical Epidemiology Centre — called Lifen’s teams to initiate a hackathon.
In 3 days, Professor Philippe Ravaud’s research team worked together with Lifen developers to co-construct a platform for remote monitoring of patients suffering from COVID-19.
This work is detailed in a scientific paper published on March 6, 2020, and can be consulted here: http://bit.ly/health-services-covid-19.
Review of the last few days of work, a project carried out in “commando” mode to revolutionize the health care process, that we wanted to share with you.
Why develop this remote monitoring platform?
In response to the urgency of the situation, it was necessary to devise a new healthcare model that would relieve hospital overcrowding, prevent contamination and ensure that beds were reserved for the most seriously ill, while facilitating the work of medical staff.
The idea? To use digital technologies to remotely monitor patients confined to their homes, in order to hospitalize only patients with severe symptoms.
The challenge was to design an operational, reliable and secure application within the deadline we set ourselves.
You will find below the methodology we adopted during these 3 days.
In practice, how does it work?
Step 1: A monitoring team, composed of healthcare professionals, is defined and attached to a reference hospital. It will analyse in real time the flow information from the remote monitoring.
Step 2: The team creates a patient follow-up through a platform, fills in a number of questions about the patient’s identity and state of health and adds his or her attending physician using the Lifen directory.
Step 3: The patient receives a notification by SMS and is invited to fill in a form to identify his/her symptoms and assess their severity, which he/she will have to fill in on a daily basis.
Each time a patient complete a form, his/her data is updated in real time, and is automatically classified according to one of four predefined categories, each relating to specific care pathways, detailed in the scientific publication: http://bit.ly/health-services-covid-19.
Treating physicians are notified on their secure e-mail or by post on three occasions: at the beginning of the follow-up, when symptoms evolve, and at the end of the follow-up.
Step 4: To assist the patients, the follow-up team has access to dashboards where they can :
1/ view all patients enrolled in remote monitoring, their main symptoms and the category assigned to them;
2/ review the data of a particular patient and agree on actions to be taken;
3/ obtain an overall view of the platform on a group of patients.
A demonstration of the service is available below.
How can this project revolutionize the care of patients in the future? And how can you participate?
We wanted to work on this platform to make it easily deployable, and allow it to support very large scale use in any size hospital. The solution is already deployed in 4 University Hospitals.
At Lifen, we strongly believe in the open source spirit. We have made the code available today in the hope that the use will grow and help a greater number of patients. The application is based on standard technologies and best practices well known by the developer community.
Instructions for contributing or deploying the application are available on GitHub: https://github.com/lifen-labs/covid.
The last few days have reminded us why we created Lifen: we believe that technology can have a huge impact on health by providing simple and effective answers to today’s problems.
Find out more about our platform at : https://covid19.lifen.fr/international-en
At Lifen, our mission is to facilitate the coordination of care between hospitals, family doctors and patients. We manage more than one million medical reports each month from 80.000 physicians.
