Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 11, 2020
Date Accepted: Jun 2, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 3, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Information technology-based management of clinically healthy COVID-19 patients: Lessons from the Living and Treatment Support Center operated by Seoul National University Hospital
ABSTRACT
Background:
South Korea took preemptive action against COVID-19 through extensive testing, thorough epidemiological investigation, strict social distancing, and quick treatment of patients according to severity. The Korean government entrusted large scale hospitals to operate living and treatment support centers for the management for clinically healthy COVID-19 patients.
Objective:
We introduce our experience implementing information and communication technology based remote patient management systems especially for a COVID-19 living and treatment support center.
Methods:
We adopted new electronic health record templates, hospital information system dashboards, cloud based medical image sharing, mobile application, and smart vital sign monitoring devices.
Results:
Enhancements were made to the hospital information system to assist in the workflow and care of patients in the living and treatment support center. A dashboard was created for the medical staff to view the vital signs and symptoms of all patients at a glance. Patients used a mobile application to answer questionnaires, input self-measured vital signs, and consult with their physician or nurse and it also linked with hospital information system in real-time. Cloud-based image sharing enabled interoperability between medical institutions. Korea’s strategy of aggressive mitigation has ‘flattened the curve’ of the rate of infection. A multidisciplinary approach was integral to develop systems to support patient care and management at the living and treatment support center as quickly as possible.
Conclusions:
Faced with a novel infectious disease, we describe the implementation and experience of applying an information and communication technology based patient management system in the living and treatment support center by SNUH. Information and communication technology based tools and applications are increasingly gaining importance in healthcare and we hope that our experience can provide insight into future technology-based infectious disease responses.
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.