Paris (AFP)
Follow the distressed patients from a distance, limit calls to the emergency services, find arms for overwhelmed hospitals ... Faced with the surge of the coronavirus, the battle also involves digital tools, deployed at full speed in the territory.
While the disease has already claimed nearly 1,700 lives in France, the number of patients is in the tens of thousands.
The vast majority, without serious symptoms, are sent home, with their fears and the risk that their condition worsens. So several hospitals set up monitoring applications for these Covid-19 patients in record time.
"The idea is not to send them home alone, to have medical remote monitoring, permanently, during the 30 days of their stay at home," said AFP Professor Patrick Jourdain, medical director. the medical telesurveillance center set up by the AP-HP in Ile-de-France.
The principle is simple. The patient is registered by a doctor, at the hospital or for a few days the general practitioners who multiply the teleconsultations, and he can then download the Covidom application, which counted Thursday evening 16,900 patients.
Each patient fills a short questionnaire once or twice a day, depending on their condition (temperature, respiratory rate, etc.). And when certain thresholds are crossed, alerts are triggered.
Hundreds of specially trained volunteers (medical students, dental students, physiotherapists, nurses) come into the picture and call the patients and assess the situation, under supervision. One doctor for four "telemonitoring", insists Professor Jourdain.
"We know that the condition of a certain number of patients will deteriorate, that they will present more severe forms of the disease. The advantage is to identify them relatively early to tell them + it is when to go to the emergency room or call 15+, "he says.
But often the sick just need a listening ear.
"They are worried, some are really stressed. So it is a lot of listening, we feel that they need to speak, to be reassured", says a "remote monitoring", Caroline Quincampoix, training assistant at the 'AP-HP.
"We have invented a new way of doing medicine 3.0. To my knowledge, it is a system that has never existed before with such volume and such versatility", welcomes Professor Jourdain.
If Covidom is new, other applications already existed elsewhere for post-operative follow-ups or certain serious pathologies. Some have been converted to emergency for Covid-19 patients.
- Volunteer in one click -
Thus, the Montpellier CHU has reconfigured its MHLink application. Covid-19 patients at home appear "on a large dashboard, categorized in red, thunderstorm, blue and green", explains to AFP Jérôme Euvrad, director of the establishment's Information System.
"A doctor calls back all the reds at the start of the session," he continues. And even when all is well, the patient can contact the caregivers through the "preferred" application.
Patient monitoring is not the only area where technology is used against this epidemic.
For the past week, thanks to an algorithm developed by the AP-HP and the Pasteur Institute, the maladiecoronavirus.fr site has been used to assess its symptoms and to be advised on the procedure to follow (stay at home, consult your doctor , call 15).
Of the 5 million visitors, 3.5 million completed the questionnaire to the end, of which 15 to 16% were directed to the Samu, according to the Digital Alliance against the Covid-19.
The goal is to reassure the French, but also to "reduce unnecessary calls to saturated Samu", said one of its members, Dr. Fabrice Denis.
Hospitals also work in increasingly unbearable conditions.
To strengthen their teams, many of them, like in Mulhouse on the front line, can call on Whoog, which has been offering a staff recruitment platform since 2015 in the event of absences or unexpected increase in activity.
Via this "mini temporary agency", each establishment or group of establishments builds up "a reserve of known people, who we know they have skills, so that they can activate them when it is not planned" , explains its founder Guerric Faure to AFP.
And in these times of health crisis, this makes it possible to "communicate with personnel present on their territory and whom they do not yet know", he underlines.
As did the Toulouse University Hospital by calling on Twitter to report on Whoog: "Nurse anesthetists, anesthetists resuscitators, IT specialists, etc. Are you a volunteer? Register in one click!".
"You will be contacted shortly if a mission matches your profile".
© 2020 AFP