Abstract
The impact of COVID-19 on healthcare services has been profound. One major impact has been underutilization of traditional healthcare services by patients. In 2020, the Saudi Ministry of Health (MoH) started offering general COVID-19 enquiries, education, and medical and psychological consultations around the clock via their 937-Call Center. Given this major change, there was a need to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Call Center services, specifically medical consultations, to suggest future recommendations for patient care optimization. This descriptive study analyzed routinely collected data on the 937-Call Center service between March 2020 and September 2020. Data were reviewed, coded, verified, and analyzed using SPSS v22. There was a 296% increase in the number of calls received by the 937-Call Center in 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. The majority of calls received in 2020 were general medical enquiries (98.41%), but about three million COVID-19-specific enquiries were also received in 2020. The increased number of calls was managed by accepting volunteers to handle calls: an average of 236 volunteers per month, handling about 20% of the total call volume. The majority of volunteers were physicians but with the presence of pharmacists, psychologists, and specialized healthcare workers such as nutritionists. Utilization of the 937-Call Center increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that it has been an effective strategy for combatting the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia. Further research is recommended to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on public awareness of the 937-Call Center and other health-related mobile apps.
Highlights
The impact of COVID-19 on healthcare services has been profound
The Central IRB of the Ministry of Health, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (National Registration Number: H-01R-009) approved and judged the study protocol as exempt from full review because it involved collection and analysis of existing data recorded by the investigators in such a manner that subjects could not be identified either directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects
The results of this study confirm our hypothesis that the utilization of the 937-Call Center services increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, consistent with other international research reporting an increase in alternative healthcare delivery methods
Summary
The impact of COVID-19 on healthcare services has been profound. One major impact has been the underutilization of healthcare services by patients. A mobile app- and web-based application called “Mawid” was launched in 2018 to provide access to the national central healthcare appointment gateway to enable patients to book their appointments at Saudi MoH Services. These apps were updated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by introducing a symptom checker to enable people with suspected COVID-19 to directly book testing appointments at dedicated COVID-19 clinics. The 937-Call Center provides medical consultations with qualified doctors, appointment reservations at MoH primary health centers, smoking cessation clinic appointments, and technical support for MoH e-applications It provides other services including medical referrals and treatment requests, complaints and reporting, receiving suggestions and creative ideas, general inquiries, and transaction follow-ups [13]. The study objectives were to (i) identify the total number of medical consultation calls to the 937Call Center in 2019 and 2020, (ii) differentiate the types of enquiries for medical consultations received in 2020 (general medical consultations, pharmaceutical consultations, psychological consultations, poison consultations, dental consultations, nutrition consultations, type 1 diabetes consultations, and smoking cessation consultations), and (iii) identify the total number of calls received in 2020 in relation to COVID-19: COVID-19 general enquiries, COVID-19 symptoms or consultation, or infection with COVID-19
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