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Digital mHealth and Virtual Care Use During COVID-19 in 4 Countries: Rapid Landscape Review

Müller, A; Cau, A; Semakula, M; Lodokiyiia, P; Abdullahi, O; Bullock, M; Hayward, A; (2022) Digital mHealth and Virtual Care Use During COVID-19 in 4 Countries: Rapid Landscape Review. JMIR Formative Research 10.2196/26041. Green open access

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Abstract

BACKGROUND: As a result of the Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, providing health care while maintaining social distancing has resulted in the need to provide care remotely, support quarantined/isolated individuals, monitor infected individuals and their close contacts, as well as disseminate accurate information regarding COVID-19 to the public. This has led to an unprecedented rapid expansion of digital tools to provide digitized virtual care globally, especially mobile phone facilitated health interventions, called mHealth. To help keep abreast of different mHealth and virtual care technologies being used internationally to facilitate patient care and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic we did a rapid investigation of solutions being deployed and considered in 4 countries. OBJECTIVE: To describe mHealth, and digital and contact tracing technologies being used in healthcare management of the COVID-19 pandemic among two high-income and two low-middle income countries. METHODS: We compared virtual care interventions used for COVID-19 management among two high-income (HI) countries (the UK and Canada) and two low-middle (LMI) countries (Kenya and Rwanda). We focused on interventions used to facilitate patient care and public health. Information regarding specific virtual care technologies was procured from a variety of resources including grey literature, government & health organization website, and co-authors' personal experiences as implementers of COVID-19 virtual care strategies. Search engine queries were performed to find health information that would be easily accessible to the general public, with keywords including "COVID-19", "contact-tracing", "tool-kit", "telehealth", and "virtual care", in conjunction with corresponding national health authorities. RESULTS: We identified a variety of technologies in Canada, the UK, Rwanda, and Kenya being used for patient care and public health. The aforementioned countries are using both video and text message-based platforms to facilitate communication with HCPs (ex. WelTel, Zoom). Nationally-developed contact-tracing apps are provided free to the public, with most of them using Bluetooth-based technology. We identified that often multiple complimentary technologies are being utilized for different aspects of patient care and public health with the common purpose to disseminate information safely. There was negligible difference among the types of technologies used in both HI and LMI countries, although LMI implemented virtual care interventions earlier during the pandemic's first wave which may account for their effective response. CONCLUSIONS: Virtual care and mHealth technologies have evolved rapidly as a tool for health care support for both patient care and public health. It is evident that, on an international level, a variety of mHealth and virtual care interventions, often in combination, are required to be able to address patient care and public health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, independent of a country's economic standing. CLINICALTRIAL: N/A.

Type: Article
Title: Digital mHealth and Virtual Care Use During COVID-19 in 4 Countries: Rapid Landscape Review
Location: Canada
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.2196/26041
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.2196/26041
Language: English
Additional information: ©Alison Müller, Alessandro Cau, Semakula Muhammed, Osman Abdullahi, Andrew Hayward, Sabin Nsanzimana, Richard Lester. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (https://formative.jmir.org), 30.11.2022. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Formative Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://formative.jmir.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
Keywords: COVID-19; virtual care; public health; mHealth; contact tracing; telehealth; Canada; United Kingdom; Kenya; Rwanda; global health; apps
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Epidemiology and Public Health
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10141258
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