Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Jul 30, 2025)
Date Submitted: Sep 17, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 17, 2024 - Nov 12, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Digital-first approach to Long COVID management: feasibility and efficacy of the Avid health programme.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Long COVID is characterised by an array of physical and psychological symptoms that can be debilitating. Given the enormous number of individuals affected by long COVID, it presents a significant, and poorly understood emerging long-term medical and socioeconomic challenge. As such, there is a pressing need to develop and test new holistic and efficient approaches to whole-person treatment and rehabilitation at scale for patients with long COVID.
Objective:
To evaluate the effectiveness of a new human-centred, digital-first health platform - Avid - for the management of long COVID by examining its impact on participants quality of life scores and symptom severity in the short-term, and the platform’s usability and acceptability for end-users.
Methods:
37 participants (35 female, mean age 46.5 years, 8.1% previously hospitalised with acute COVID) with long Covid were recruited into the Avid program. Avid is a human-centred, digital-first platform that delivers a 6-week program providing structured, personalised health coaching and tailored digital content aligned to specific weekly goals. The approach facilitates a standardised approach through evidenced-based treatment strategies, whilst simultaneously supporting personalised, adaptable care at scale. A quasi-experimental single arm pre-post intervention design was employed to evaluate the platform. The primary outcome measures were C19-YRSm and EQ5D-5L quality of life scores. Usability and acceptability of the program for participants was examined through Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and qualitative semi-structured interviews.
Results:
The Avid program led to significant and sustained improvements in C19-YRSm scores at week 6 (5.57 (SD 1.79) vs. 3.95 (SD 1.35), p=0.0001, mean improvement 41.0%); week 10 (5.07 (SD1.78) vs. 3.93 (1.18), p=0.0003, mean improvement 29.0%); and week 22 (5.08 (SD 1.68) vs. 3.88 (SD 1.13), p=0.0001, mean improvement 30.9%). The program also led to significant improvements in EQ5D-5L Index scores at week 6 (0.54 (SD 0.25) vs. 0.44 (SD 0.23) p=0.0005, mean improvement 25.0%); week 10 (0.51 (SD 0.25) vs. 0.44 (SD 0.24), p=0.0382, mean improvement 15.9%); and week 22 (0.54 (SD 0.23) vs. 0.46 (SD 0.23), p=0.0103, mean improvement 17.4%. The program was well received with 100% engagement and completion at 6 weeks. NPS scores showed 70% of participants were promoters of the program with a mean individual score of 8.64.
Conclusions:
The pilot study indicates that the Avid platform is safe, feasible and effective. It produces significant and sustained improvements in the symptoms and severity of long COVID, and wider measures of quality of life in the short-term. These findings suggest that the approach may provide a clinically impactful, cost-effective, and scalable platform that can successfully manage the challenges of long COVID. The modular approach of the platform also readily facilitates its rapid development and expansion to address other health challenges and long-term conditions in the future.
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.