Epidemiological Observation From a Smartphone Self-monitoring Application for Suspected COVID-19 Patients' Triage

A coronavirus pandemic began on 12/31/2020 with the first Chinese patient. As of 3/16/2020, the epidemic affects more than 100 countries with 169,000 official infections and 6,500 deaths. This virus causes a pathology ranging from simple flu symptoms in 80% of cases to acute respiratory distress syndromes requiring resuscitation in 5% of cases and a death rate of 1.4 to 4% of cases.

The arrival in France on 02/25/2020 with an exponential development of the infection (more than 5,000 cases on 03/15/2020) was accompanied by an unprecedented number of calls to the French emergency service call number (15) of worried patients with overload and sometimes saturation of the service that can impact calls and the care of patients really recovering from an emergency.

We previously developed a Moovcare® web application which showed a 7 months survival benefit by early detection of relapsed lung cancer based on the reporting of patient symptoms analyzed by a validated algorithm in 300 patients and 1 trial randomized. Another application for detecting and monitoring chemo-induced febrile aplasia appears to show a reduction in the number of hospitalizations for sepsis. Finally, Smokecheck, a self-assessment application for symptoms by smokers, has shown that it improves the detection of symptomatic operable bronchial cancers (9 to 24%, p = 0.04).

The web application https://www.maladiecoronavirus.fr/ was developed with a group of physicians from the Institut Pasteur, Hospitals group of Paris, Hospitals of Lille and Rennes and the ILC Jean Bernard in Le Mans. It makes it possible to guide symptomatic patients and patients who wishing to know what to do (call their general practitioner, teleconsultation, or call emergency service) based on symptoms and predictive factors of severity.

Following the availability of this new tool, we want to assess the impact of the application on the number and relevance of calls to emergency service.