English

Abstract

BACKGROUND The global wide adoption of telemedicine provided a considerable and long-lasting influence in healthcare but was not firmly established in a catastrophic situation like the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, the purpose of this study was to enlighten the efficacy of telemedicine and its competence in treating mild COVID-19 patients in a home isolation setup. METHODS 200 patients were enrolled for the COVID Tele home Care Services initiated by the Department of Respiratory Medicine, Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research Institute (SRIHER), Chennai, India from August 2020- November 2020. All the enrolled patients were RT-PCR confirmed COVID 19 with mild severity and were virtually telemonitored and treated by video and audio calls. Measures such as age, sex, present clinical complaints, existing co-morbidities, blood investigations, oxygen saturation (Spo2), and radiological investigations were detailed at the time of enrolment and discharge. Statistical analyses with SPSS version 19 were executed to determine the p-value significance (P < 0.05). RESULTS Among the 200 patients enrolled for this study, 167 patients were symptomatic and 33 were asymptomatic. 77 % of the patients had symptom resolution within 1 week and the remaining 23 % were monitored for up to 14 days. Out of 195 patients discharged from home care, only 5 required hospitalization because of persisting symptoms like fever, vomiting, deranged blood parameters and desaturation. CONCLUSIONS Telemonitoring of mild COVID-19 patients under a specialist team including pulmonologists, nursing, paramedics, nutritionist, and psychologist is found to be a safe, reliable, and competent model in such pandemics. KEY WORDS COVID-19, Healthcare System, Pandemic, Telemedicine, Telemonitoring.