Rapid Development of an mHealth Application to Facilitate Remote Care for COVID-19 Patients: The DrCovid+ (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND The 2019 novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has severely burdened the healthcare system through its rapid transmission. To facilitate remote monitoring and continuity of care for COVID-19 patients, mobile health (mHealth) is seen as a viable solution. However, the conceptualization and development of mHealth applications are often labor and time-intensive, laden with concerns relating to data security and privacy, and faced poor adoption due to communication-related barriers, and struggle with continued engagement due to perceived lack of benefits. The rapid development of a mHealth application that is cost-effective and secure will be a timely enabler. OBJECTIVE This project aims to develop a mHealth application – The DrCovid+ to facilitate the remote monitoring and continuity of care for COVID-19 patients. METHODS Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach was adopted in the development of the application prototype. Stakeholders including decision-makers, physicians, nurses, healthcare administrators, and research engineers were engaged. The process began with requirements gathering to define and finalize the project scope followed by an iterative process of developing a working prototype, User Acceptance Test (UAT), and improvement work before the actual implementation. Co-designing principles were applied to ensure equal collaborative efforts and common agreement amongst stakeholders. RESULTS The DrCovid+ was developed on Telegram services and hosted on a cloud server. It features a secure enrolment and patient data interface, a multi-lingual communication channel, and automatic and personalized push messaging. A backend dashboard was also developed to collect patients’ vital signs for remote monitoring and continuity of care. To date, 20 patients have been enrolled into the system, amounting to 203 bed days saved. CONCLUSIONS Rapid development and implementation of the DrCovid+ allow for timely clinical and social care management for COVID-19 patients. This facilitates early patient hospital discharge and continuity of care while ensuring the safety and wellbeing of healthcare providers by minimizing physical interactions. The use case for the DrCovid+ can also be extended beyond the hospital walls and adopted for other medical conditions to advance patient care and empowerment within the community to meet the existing and rising population health challenges. CLINICALTRIAL N.A.