Triagem remota de pacientes baseada em aplicativo para reduzir filas em unidades de saúde

Abstract

The internet changes people’s lives and daily lives, facilitating personal interactions, including in the health area. Telemedicine has become a tool capable of aggregating health information from its users and connecting them to health environments remotely, either through teleconsultations, access to exams and contact with specialists from different areas, resulting in lower costs and agility in health systems. Remote assistance stands out in telemedicine as an innovative strategy to promote health and improve patient management and care. From this strategy, it is possible to obtain physiological data for triage patients through the analysis of parameters such as oximetry, heart rate, temperature and blood pressure. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, public and private health environments are overloaded and, in view of this, a tool that performs remote triage using smartphone and sends data to the health professional via the internet is necessary. The objective of this work is to propose a new architecture for remote home triage of patients based on an application for smartphones in order to reduce the waiting time in health environments, also avoiding possible contacts between patients with infectious diseases. An application for smartphones with Android® system, called Clinitiba, was developed to meet the needs of patients (patient user) and health professionals (provider user). The proposed method offers the action of remote triage for patients to include the parameters obtained by hospital equipment. After triage, patients are sent for teleconsultation, with a maximum waiting time of 20 minutes, which may be shorter if the parameters are associated with high levels of care. In the application it is also possible to include previously performed exams, access the data of doctors registered by the provider user, add medicines to avoid administration forgetfulness, write suggestions and access health tips. The provider user will be able to visualize the results of the measured parameters and start the teleconsultation. Simulations were performed to validate the application, resulting in an average service time of 14 minutes. Comparing these data to the waiting time in hospitals, public before the pandemic and private nowadays, there was an 84.3% and 84.9% improvement in this time, respectively. It is expected that health expenditures with the implementation of the application will decrease, due to the lower investment in fac-to-face environments and greater patient satisfaction. Thus, the application developed throughout this study obtained positive results regarding its main objective, reduction in waiting time for medical care.