COD19 and COD20: An Italian Experience of Active Home Surveillance in COVID-19 Patients

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic found Italy unprepared to cope with the large concentrated numbers of patients infected with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who often required hospital admission and in many cases intensive care. This pandemic very quickly overwhelmed the Italian Healthcare System. This paper describes the Active Home Surveillance System (Operations Center for Discharged Patients; COD19) and the Home Hospital Care System (COD20) and presents the clinical data collected and the level of user satisfaction with the service. The Operations Center for Discharged Patients (COD19) is an active surveillance service for home-care patients which involves: (1) monitoring critical clinical conditions; (2) recognizing social and health issues; (3) and providing necessary clinical services in the form of a telemedicine service. COD20 is a patient-specialist video consultation service that allows to perform an assessment of clinical conditions and any need to visit; defining the priority of access to specialist outpatient visits in the presence or manageable with the new video consultation model. This service was immediately necessary during the COD19 monitoring. COD19 and COD20 are based on the Amazon Web Services Serverless certified platform. The COD19 and COD20 platform can be intrinsically utilized for future epidemic outbreaks; also those with non-respiratory transmission; and is sufficiently flexible to adapt to natural catastrophes.