Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Apr 11, 2020
Date Accepted: Jun 4, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 5, 2020
Digital Health Strategies To Fight Covid-19 Around The Globe: Challenges And Recommendations
ABSTRACT
Background The Covid-19 pandemic urges coordinated mechanisms to respond to the outbreak across health sectors. Digital health solutions have been identified as promising pillars to tackle this challenge. Methods This review investigated peer reviewed articles and grey literature to highlight digital health solutions aiming to manage the Covid-19 crisis and reduce its impact on the citizens and the healthcare systems. It also discusses the challenges and ethical hurdles for a broader and long term implementation. Results In order to decrease the risk of infection, telemedicine was used as a successful healthcare model in both emergency and primary care. Official communication plans should promote easy and diverse channels to inform the population and to avoid rumors and reduce threats to public health. Social media such as Twitter or Google trends analyses are highly beneficial to model trends of the pandemic as well as to monitor the evolution of peoples’ symptoms or reaction to the pandemic over time. Acceptability of digital solutions has to be confronted with cultural, moral and religious backgrounds. With the priority given to a collective public health benefit, digital tools may sometimes be intrusive and can erode individual freedoms or leave vulnerable populations behind. Conclusion This pandemic showed the strong potential of the various digital health solutions tested in the Covid-19 crisis. More concerted measures should now ensure future digital health initiatives to have a greater impact on the epidemic and most strategic needs to ease the life of those who are at the front of the crisis.
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.