Review Study of Digital Health-related Solutions to Control COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis for the 10 Highest Prevalent Countries.

BACKGROUND: The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as a case of pneumonia becomes a global pandemic, affecting most of the countries around the world. digital health as information technologies that can be applied in three aspects including digital patients, digital devices, and digital clinics could help against this pandemic. OBJECTIVE: Recent reviews have examined the role of digital health in controlling COVID-19 to identify the potential of digital health to fight against the disease. However, this study is aimed at reviewing and analyzing applied digital technology to control the COVID-19 pandemic in ten countries with the highest prevalence of the disease. METHODS: For this review, Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases were searched in August 2020 to retrieve publications from December 2019 to 15 March 2020. Furthermore, the Google search engine was also investigated to identify additional applications of digital health for COVID-19 pandemic control. RESULTS: 32 papers were included in this review reported 37 digital health applications for COVID-19 control. Most of the projects for COVID-19 fighting were telemedicine visit (N=11, 30%). Digital learning packages for informing about the disease (N=7, 19%), GIS and QR code application for real-time case tracking (N=7, 19%), as well as cloud /mobile based systems for self-care and patient tracking (N=7, 19%) were in the second rank of digital tool applications. projects deployed by collaboration of European countries, USA, Australia, and China. CONCLUSIONS: Having considered the potential of available information technologies across the world in the 21st century, particularly in developed countries, it seems that more digital health products with higher level of intelligence capability have remained to be applied for pandemic and health related crisis management.