Multichannel services for patient home-based care during COVID-19

Abstract

At the beginning of 2020, the Worldwide Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus. In this sense, this article describes an experiment carried out in a Portuguese health institution during the COVID-19 pandemic between March and July 2020. The number of cases of infection increased exponentially and health facilities were forced to adapt to the circumstances. Due to the health facility limited resources they had to be innovative. A new modality of care service was introduced in which patients were admitted to home-based care to receive medical follow-up. The modality introduced focuses mainly on multichannel interaction between patients and health professionals. Two channels of interaction were made available to patients in home-based care to interact with health professionals. Also, a back-office platform was designed to support health professionals in the management of patients diagnosed with the disease and all the processes related to patient remote follow-up and their decision-making. The results of the experiments were very positive with the modality implemented both for patients and care facilities and their health professionals. The patients were able to receive medical follow-up at their houses without any major complications and they were included in their treatment process. The care facility was able to better manage and reallocate their resource according to their need. This modality proved to be a win-win situation for all the parties involved.