Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Apr 22, 2022)
Date Submitted: Feb 25, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
www.coronabambini.ch: Development and usage of an online decision support tool for pediatric COVID-testing in Switzerland
ABSTRACT
Background:
To support the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) national pediatric COVID-19 testing strategy, we created an online public health decision tool for caregivers and healthcare workers.
Objective:
To describe the development and usage of www.coronabambini.ch as an example of a pediatric electronic public health application and to explore its potential in providing information on disease epidemiology and public health policy implementation.
Methods:
We developed and maintained a non-commercial online decision support tool, www.coronabambini.ch, based on the FOPH pediatric COVID-19 guidelines around testing and school/daycare attendance. We analyzed the online decision tool as well as a voluntary follow-up survey from October 2020 to September 2021 to explore its potential as a surveillance tool for public health policy and epidemiology.
Results:
68’269 users accessed the tool and 52’726 filled out the complete online decision tool. 3% (1’399/52’726) filled out a voluntary follow-up survey via mail after 14 days. 92% (18’797/20’330) of users were parents. Certain dynamics of the pandemic and changes in testing strategies were reflected in the data captured by the tool: gastrointestinal symptoms were reported more frequently in the younger age groups (13% (3’308/26’180) in children 0-5 years, 9% (3’934/42’089) in children ≥6years, X 2=184, P=<.001). The proportion of users consulting the tool for a positive contact without symptoms in children 6-12 years increased from 4% (1’415/32’215) to 6% (636/9’872) after the FOPH loosened testing criteria in this age group, X 2=69, P=<.001. Adherence to the recommendation was generally high 84% (1’131/1’352) but differed by the type of recommendation: 89% (344/385) for “stay at home and observe”, 75% (232/310) for “school attendance”, X 2=25, P=<.001.
Conclusions:
www.coronabambini.ch played a central role during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland through supporting testing decisions for children. Certain patterns in epidemiology and adherence to public health policy could be depicted showing the potential of digital decision support as public health tools.
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.