Closely monitor patients with Covid-19 or suspected of having it without serious symptoms, while avoiding contamination. To meet this challenge, the AP-HP (Public Assistance-Hospitals of Paris) launched in early March a remote monitoring application available on mobile phones. Called Covidom, the application is already used by 19,000 patients in Île-de-France. And many patients continue to register hourly with their attending physician. Europe 1 takes stock of how it works.
How does Covidom work?
Each day, the patient receives one or two questionnaires by SMS. Via these forms, he is taught to monitor his body data, like a doctor would. These are, for example, temperature, heart rate or respiratory rate.
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What happens if there is a problem?
When one of the indicated signals is bad, an alert is sent to a team of medical, nursing or dental students. These are supervised by doctors.
"I can tell you about the case of a patient: It was a red alert earlier," said Mathis, 21, a physiotherapy student. "He was having difficulty breathing. You could hear him just by talking. We were forced to call the Samu. We called him within minutes of the red alert."
"We have a response time of nine minutes for a maximum red alert. I dealt with one earlier in a minute," he said. At the end of the line, there are now a hundred picking up their phones, against five in early March.
What use for hospitals?
By monitoring the patients who are supposed to be the least serious from a distance, Covidom is also a way of relieving congestion in healthcare establishments. Cardiologist Patrick Jourdain, who oversaw the creation of the platform, anticipated it at the start of the epidemic. "I have a patient who called Samu X times. Other patients go to the emergency room a lot of times, they stay twelve hours and then they come back home because there is no specific treatment. Here, these patients, we can keep them at home. But we can also anticipate a worsening, that is to say that we feel that the patient is starting to be average, "he explains.
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