Dedicated team to ambulatory care for patients with COVID-19 requiring oxygen: Low rate of hospital readmission

Starting Home Telemonitoring and Oxygen Therapy Directly after Emergency Department Assessment Appears to Be Safe in COVID-19 Patients

“…In order to make the conclusion that home telemonitoring is safe, it is important to put our results in perspective to the results of other studies. By putting our safety results in perspective to existing literature, we could conclude that our number of ED reassessments and number of readmissions were almost similar to existing literature that concluded that home telemonitoring is safe [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. This judgment is subjective, however, there is no gold standard to rely on.…”

“…A limitation of our study is the small sample size, which might have an impact on the results. Yet, the sample size is comparable to the sample size in similar studies [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. To be noticed, health care is organized differently in every country, which might also affect a direct comparison between our study and the literature.…”

“…This judgment is subjective, however, there is no gold standard to rely on. To our knowledge, there are only four studies describing the safety and efficacy of home telemonitoring and oxygen started directly after ED assessment [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. Readmission rates reported in these studies range from 4.8% in a group of patients managed by a dedicated medical team on ambulatory care for patients requiring oxygen therapy to 20% in a group of patients requiring oxygen therapy managed by the ED physicians [ 17 ], to 9.3% in the study by Kuo [ 19 ] and 17.5% in the study by Terp [ 18 ].…”

“…With regard to reassessments at the ED, our rate of 23.8% is also in line with reported reassessment rates by others: 6.7% reported by Kuo et al [ 19 ], 21.6% reported by Steel et al [ 20 ] and 23.1% reported by Terp et al [ 18 ]. Viel et al [ 17 ] did not report on ED reassessment rates. The mortality rate (3.1%) in our study is slightly higher than the mortality rates reported by Terp et al (1.4%) [ 18 ] and Steel et al (1.5%) [ 20 ], however, in those studies, it is not clear if this rate is an all-cause mortality rate or COVID-19 specific.…”

“…Published studies on the safety of home telemonitoring started directly after an assessment at the Emergency Department (ED) [ 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ] or on the safety of home telemonitoring and oxygen therapy [ 15 , 16 ] are sparse. As far as we know, there are only four studies describing the results of home telemonitoring and oxygen therapy started directly after ED assessment; one was performed in Guadeloupe [ 17 ] and three in the United States of America [ 18 , 19 , 20 ].…”