AtHoC-19

The objective of the AtHoC-19 project was to develop a reliable solution to monitor COVID-19 patients, in order to accelerate the monitoring and controlling process and to relieve health institution workers from checking up on each patient. A solution in the form of a dashboard would receive inputs, such as alarm thresholds, from health institution workers and apply them to the monitoring system. If the threshold is surpassed, the dashboard alerts the health institution worker. The final solution fulfils the requirements established by the project and appears to also be useful for the monitoring of patients with other diseases.

The project, with the title “At-Home COVID-19 Monitoring and Triaging Platform”, was funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 (H2020) framework program, starting September 2020 and lasted 26 weeks. AtHoC-19 had the objective of implementing a fully regulatory compliant clinical dashboard for COVID-19 early warning score-based triaging that is able to monitor patients located at home and recognise early signs of patients in need of further care and hospitalisation.

The first implementation phase involved the design of the dashboard in order for it to be user-friendly and easy to use for health institution workers, such as nurses and doctors. This task was successfully performed and it was followed by the integration with sample data available of COVID-19 patients in order to test the design in a realistic scenario. Then, the implementation of the triaging dashboard took place supported by the design and the defined requirements. The COVID-19 triaging dashboard, which was developed, consists of an interactive patient list, patient details according to the selection of the user and various further actions related to decision making of patient status, which can be performed by the user. Finally, after the implementation, a testing phase occurred with several feedback loops focused on the improvement of the dashboard and the overall system.

During the project, five partner organisations and over 15 project members were involved. The AtHoC-19 project was led by the organisation Think Biosolution, and the other partner organisations were SYNYO, Wellola and Chino.io. The last partner organisation, Health innovation Ireland, had the role of collaboration partner in the project and also had a participation in the project.

The following established objectives were achieved in the project:

• Develop a clinical dashboard for COVID-19 early warning score-based triaging. 
• Achieve a successful integration of the platform in a real-world hospital setting of a tele-health partner. 
• Confirm assumption that the platform positively supports health providers, their processes and reduces healthcare employee’s workload. 

Project impacts

Thus, the system is ready to be integrated with the systems of health institutions such as hospitals and clinics, which are the major beneficiaries of the solution developed in this project. 

While developing the methodology and process of dashboard, an alternative finding was established. The finding was that the methodology is not limited to be used with COVID-19 patients, and that the dashboard can be customised to monitor patients with other diseases such as for chronic disease prevention. Thus, the expected impact of the solution developed was expanded compared to the expected impact. And the customisation of the dashboard for monitoring another specific disease can be seen as a future goal of the dashboard development.

Keywords

COVID-19 dashboard, remote-patient monitoring dashboard, healthcare dashboard, dashboard development.