Digital health has grown exponentially over the last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of medical visits and nursing care. It has shown to be effective in aspects such as clinical process modelling, fostering prevention, monitoring and decision support.
This will be one of the aspects to be discussed at the ‘Covid-19: what we’ve learned and how technology can help us’ roundtable which will take place at the 6th XPatient Barcelona Congress organised by the Eurecat technology centre, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona and the TIC Salut Social Foundation with the support of the XPA Barcelona (Patient Experience) community of practice.
Hospital Clínic’s Reporting Division has noted “a spectacular increase in non-face-to-face medical visits,” says Dr Raimon Camps, Patient Experience coordinator at Hospital Clínic’s Plató-AISBE site. While in 2019 the vast majority of outpatient visits were face-to-face, in 2020 there were 175,402 phone visits which accounted for over 40 percent of second visits made in outpatient clinics.
Nursing visits rose from 51,474 to 90,948 remote visits, up by 77 percent.
Covid-19 “has fast-tracked the rollout of new tools and new resources to treat patients in all the stages of their care journey,” says Felip Miralles, Eurecat’s director of Digital Health. This ranges from infection prevention, early diagnosis and traceability to follow-up, home care and potential transitions from home to hospital and vice versa.
“By drawing on all the data gathered, we can deliver more informed, real-time decision support tools which make it possible to manage health based much more on data and not so much on intuition,” he adds. An example of this is “the Proceed tool which harnesses artificial intelligence techniques using heterogeneous data to predict the 21-day evolution of the incidence of Covid-19, infection rates, admissions and occupancy in hospitals and ICUs.”
“The pandemic has compelled us to adapt our tools for assessing the patient experience,” points out Dr Joan Escarrabill from the XPA Barcelona (Patient Experience) community of practice and the Patient Experience team at Hospital Clínic. “In 2020, 29 focus groups were conducted via videoconference with over 200 patients and practitioners and open activities were held online with more than 2,500 participants.”
“Digital transformation has been evolving in the country and more specifically in the health sector in recent years,” notes Josuè Sallent, the TIC Salut Social Foundation director. “Covid-19 has further stepped up the pace of change and the speed of transformation and this has led to greater use of video consultation tools coupled with other non-face-to-face services.”
Over this period of time “we have all had to respond almost straight away without losing sight of other aspects and patients with other medical conditions in the country. In fact, 47 percent of Catalonia’s public hospitals, 31 out of a total of 66, are currently using the Catalan Health Service’s corporate video consultation tool and the number is expected to increase.”
“At a time of pandemic due to a new virus which affects a very large number of people and leads to a disease which is unknown, it is essential to have real-time monitoring of everything that is going on,” points out Carolina Garcia-Vidal, senior specialist in the Infectious Diseases Department at Hospital Clínic.
As part of this approach, “at Hospital Clínic we invested in innovation and developing technology to support doctors in their battle against Covid-19. So we set up a Covid-19 patient monitoring facility featuring real-time information on the clinical phenotypes of patients so that they can get early and personalised treatment with outstanding outcomes.”
The Covid-19 pandemic “has prompted us to change the way we care for people very quickly,” says Silvia Roura Rovira, assistant manager at CAPSBE. “New technology has been crucial and has gained a strong foothold.”
“Virtual, phone and video consultations have shown that we can keep up our quality of care and be effective in meeting the needs of the people we serve.”
“We’ve learned that primary care teams are highly adaptable and resilient,” she adds. This means “we have to be proactive in procedures and protocols, conveying clear messages to the public and most importantly being flexible when dealing with change.” In her view “the vaccine rollout has brought us fresh hope.”
This new edition of the XPatient Barcelona Congress is to be held on 28-29 September. It will address how the experience of the pandemic has changed perceptions and ways of doing things in healthcare alongside the impact of technology as a process accelerator with many overarching lessons learned.
