JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Overcoming the COVID-19 crisis requires new ideas and strategies for online communication of personal medical information. Rapid testing of a large number of subjects is essential to monitor, and delay, the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to mitigate the pandemic's consequences. People not knowing that they are infected may not stay in quarantine and, thus, risk infecting others. Unfortunately, the massive number of COVID-19 tests performed is challenging for both laboratories and the units that take the throat swab and communicate the results.

Objective:

Reducing the communication burden for healthcare professionals. We developed a secure and easy-to-use tracking system to report COVID-19 test results online which is simple to understand for the tested subjects as soon as these results become available. Instead of personal calls, the system updates the status and the results of the tests automatically. This aims to reduce the delay when informing testees about their results and, consequently, to slow down the virus spread.

Methods:

The application draws on the existing TraqBio software. With the extension of this open-source and browser-based online tracking system, we aim to minimize the time required to inform the tested person and the test units, e.g. hospitals or the public healthcare system. The system can be integrated into the clinical workflow with very modest effort and avoids excessive load to telephone hotlines.

Results:

The test status and results are published on a secured web-page enabling regular status checks by patients not using smartphones which has some importance as smartphone usage diminishes with age. Stress tests and statistics show the performance of our software. CTest is currently running at two University Hospitals (Ulm, Tübingen; Germany) with thousands of tests each week. Results show a mean number of 10 views per testee.

Conclusions:

CTest runs independent of existing infrastructures, aims at straight-forward integration, and safe transmission of information. The system is easy-to-use for testees. QR Code links allow for quick accession to the test results. The mean number of views per entry indicates the reduced amount of time for both, healthcare professionals and testees. The system is quite generic and can be extended and adapted to other communcation tasks.