Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: May 9, 2020
Date Accepted: Aug 2, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 4, 2020
Using mHealth to increase the reach of local guidance to health professionals as part of institutional response plan to COVID-19 Outbreak: A Quantitative Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Current COVID-19 related sanitary crisis has led many hospitals worldwide to rapidly restructure their organization. In response to the rapidly evolving body of evidence, a solid strategy is needed to disseminate local and validated guidance to help implementing recommendations for COVID-19 management.
Objective:
We describe the use of a dedicated mobile Health (mHealth) platform as part of an institutional dissemination strategy of an up-to-date guidance about the COVID-19 to all healthcare workers (HCW) in a large academic hospital.
Methods:
A multidisciplinary team of experts produced local guidance related to COVID-19. Sixty documents and 17 external links were produced. Documents were disseminated on an already functional mHealth platform for HCW. Using a third-party statistics tool, data concerning user activity and content use was anonymously collected. The user activity was compared between the 14-day period after targeted dissemination (TD) to the prior 2-months period.
Results:
After TD, the number of active devices doubled from 684 to 1400; 912 new users downloaded the application for a total of 2532 users. Sixty COVID-19 related documents were viewed 7740 times, which represents 71.2% of total content views (10’869), including 530 documents accessed per day. User activity increased on a fourfold basis with number of active devices rising from 53 (IQR:40-70) to 210 (IQR:167-297), p <0.001. The number of sessions per day rose from 166 (IQR:110-246) to 704 (517-1028), p<0.001.
Conclusions:
The use of a mHealth solution to disseminate time-sensitive medical knowledge seemed to be an effective solution to increase the reach of targeted audience.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© 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.