From Isolation to Coordination: How Can Telemedicine Help Combat the COVID-19 Outbreak?

  1. Yunkai Zhai
  2. Yichuan Wang
  3. Minhao Zhang
  4. Jody Hoffer Gittell
  5. Shuai Jiang
  6. Baozhan Chen
  7. Fangfang Cui
  8. Xianying He
  9. Jie Zhao
  10. Xiaojun Wang

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Abstract

The rapid spread of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presents China with a critical challenge. As normal capacity of the Chinese hospitals is exceeded, healthcare professionals struggling to manage this unprecedented crisis face the difficult question of how best to coordinate the medical resources used in highly separated locations. Responding rapidly to this crisis, the National Telemedicine Center of China (NTCC), located in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, has established the Emergency Telemedicine Consultation System (ETCS), a telemedicine-enabled outbreak alert and response network. ETCS is built upon a doctor-to-doctor (D2D) approach, in which health services can be accessed remotely through terminals across hospitals. The system architecture of ETCS comprises three major architectural layers: (1) telemedicine service platform layer, (2) telemedicine cloud layer, and (3) telemedicine service application layer. Our ETCS has demonstrated substantial benefits in terms of the effectiveness of consultations and remote patient monitoring, multidisciplinary care, and prevention education and training.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.02.20.20025957: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.02.20.20025957v1 on medRxiv