Early experiences of the Your COVID Recovery® digital programme for individuals with long COVID 2022 Lloyd-Evans et al

Abstract

Objectives To describe the early data from the Your COVID Recovery® digital programme and to explore the data collected from two embedded outcome measures.

Design Observational.

Setting Primary and secondary care (England—Online).

Participants 110 individuals completed the programme (68.1% female, 88.1% White British, age: 46.3 (10.8) years, weight: 86.5 (21.1) kg, height: 169.3 (10.0) cm). 47.2% of patients reported comorbidities.

Intervention Following an assessment by a healthcare professional, individuals with long COVID were offered access to the Your COVID Recovery® digital programme. The programme comprises of four stages for the participants to progress through. Participants are encouraged to record severity of their symptoms and amount of activity they are doing on a symptom and an activity tracker. Resources and interactive material on managing symptoms of long COVID are available throughout each stage.

Primary outcome measures Questionnaire (EuroQ0l 5-Dimension 5-Level (EQ-5D-5L) and the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease assessment test (CAT)) data were extracted from the site from 11 March 2021 until 9 November 2021.

Results Participants were on the programme for 8.6 (4.3) weeks. There was a statistically significant increase in EQ-5D-5L visual analogue scale (VAS) score (pre=48.8 (19.5); post=59.9 (22.1); p<0.01). The EQ-5D-5L Index Value preintervention to postintervention did improve but not significantly (pre=0.5 (0.3); post=0.6 (0.3); p=0.09). CAT total score improved significantly preintervention to postintervention (pre=19.8 (7.2); post=15.6 (7.6); p<0.01). All CAT item scores significantly improved preintervention to postintervention (p<0.005), except the phlegm item score (p=0.168).

Discussion This early data describes the impact of the Your COVID Recovery® digital programme on the first cohort of patients to complete the digital recovery programme. The outcome data are promising and should encourage uptake.

Open access, https://bmjopenrespres.bmj.com/content/9/1/e001237

 

Needs a control. Given the bulk of long haulers appear to recover doing nothing at all its not enough to see improvement, it needs to exceed the average improvement with no intervention.

 

Why so few? It's all self-reported, right? OK, so for this study they had an initial assessment. Most users will not have this assessment, so this is not an evaluation of the service as it is. I don't know why that would be needed.

They have a digital platform with user-generated data, it's a self-serve thing. It could have evaluated the entire user base, adding up larger numbers is not a problem anymore.

And, under "things we already know":

"Evidence"-based medicine: recommendations are emerging, despite lack of evidence. Amazing. This is the true process anyway: generic recommendations are made, then evidence is built to support them.

 

Clinicians said most of their users didn't like it much

 

Where did you see that?

 

Which in SOME circles would seem to count as overwhelming evidence.

I asked!