Department of Health Information Management, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
Modeling in Health Research Center, Institute for Future Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran.
J Med Internet Res. 2021 Mar 10;23(3):e19473. doi: 10.2196/19473.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has become a global pandemic, affecting most countries worldwide. Digital health information technologies can be applied in three aspects, namely digital patients, digital devices, and digital clinics, and could be useful in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recent reviews have examined the role of digital health in controlling COVID-19 to identify the potential of digital health interventions to fight the disease. However, this study aims to review and analyze the digital technology that is being applied to control the COVID-19 pandemic in the 10 countries with the highest prevalence of the disease.
For this review, the Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases were searched in August 2020 to retrieve publications from December 2019 to March 15, 2020. Furthermore, the Google search engine was used to identify additional applications of digital health for COVID-19 pandemic control.
We included 32 papers in this review that reported 37 digital health applications for COVID-19 control. The most common digital health projects to address COVID-19 were telemedicine visits (11/37, 30%). Digital learning packages for informing people about the disease, geographic information systems and quick response code applications for real-time case tracking, and cloud- or mobile-based systems for self-care and patient tracking were in the second rank of digital tool applications (all 7/37, 19%). The projects were deployed in various European countries and in the United States, Australia, and China.
Considering the potential of available information technologies worldwide in the 21st century, particularly in developed countries, it appears that more digital health products with a higher level of intelligence capability remain to be applied for the management of pandemics and health-related crises.
由新型冠状病毒 SARS-CoV-2 引起的 COVID-19 已成为全球性大流行疾病，影响了世界上大多数国家。数字健康信息技术可应用于数字患者、数字设备和数字诊所三个方面，在抗击 COVID-19 大流行方面可能具有重要作用。
近期综述研究了数字健康在控制 COVID-19 中的作用，以确定数字健康干预措施抗击该疾病的潜力。然而，本研究旨在综述和分析在 COVID-19 发病率最高的 10 个国家中用于控制 COVID-19 大流行的数字技术。
在 2020 年 8 月，通过 Google Scholar、PubMed、Web of Science 和 Scopus 数据库检索 2019 年 12 月至 2020 年 3 月 15 日期间的文献，并通过 Google 搜索引擎查找其他用于控制 COVID-19 大流行的数字健康应用程序。
本综述纳入了 32 篇报告 37 项 COVID-19 控制数字健康应用的文献。用于应对 COVID-19 的最常见数字健康项目是远程医疗访问（11/37，30%）。用于向人们提供疾病信息的数字学习包、用于实时病例追踪的地理信息系统和快速响应码应用程序、以及基于云或移动的自我护理和患者追踪系统是第二级别的数字工具应用程序（均为 7/37，19%）。这些项目在多个欧洲国家以及美国、澳大利亚和中国得到了部署。
考虑到 21 世纪全球现有信息技术的潜力，特别是在发达国家，似乎还有更多具有更高智能能力的数字健康产品有待应用于大流行病和与健康相关的危机管理。
