Building and Deploying a COVID-19 Monitoring Solution in March

COVID-19 has been a challenge for health-care professionals and health-care systems. The wave provides at least two problems for healthcare professionals: first, the risk of infection, and second, the lack of time to treat all the COVID-19 patients while some form of normal care is supposed to continue. The time that health-care professionals have to spend per patient can be reduced if they are able to monitor the patients without meeting them. This can be done if patients report their status using patient-reported outcomes (PROs), defined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as "any report of the status of a patient's health condition that comes directly from the patient, without interpretation of the patient's response by a clinician or anyone else."1 Reports indicate that 80% of COVID-19 patients are able to recover at home without medical assistance. The "worried well"2 are a group of patients that are concerned about their health but do not have health problems that need to be addressed. PROs may also help doctors reassure those patients without meeting them. The same information can also be used to quickly triage patients and refer them to the appropriate caregiver who may or may not be within the same health-care organization.