A Kerala-based medical experiment of Virtual COVID In-Patient Care (VCIP), which is a home-based interventional model of treating COVID patients, has found a great degree of success, according to the medical team that led the experiment.
The VCIP care follows evidence-based recommendations on evaluation and treatment of COVID-19, but it enables patients to treat themselves or with the help of their family members, at home. A detailed account of the protocol, methodology and outcome of the model tried out by the Jothydev’s Diabetes Research Centre (JDC) has been published in Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews , an Elsevier journal, recently.
In this protocol, the patients diagnosed with SARS-CoV2 are provided with home monitoring devices such as blood pressure apparatus, glucometers and thermometer. The VCIP team comprises doctors, nurses, diabetes educators, dietitians and psychologists. The nurses train the patients or their caretakers at home by way of video consultations to use the devices themselves, especially the Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices. Lab investigations are also carried out whenever required and samples are collected at home itself.
Dr. Jothydev Kesavadev, chairman and managing director of JDC, said all the 220 patients, who availed themselves of the VCIP facility, recovered. There were two hospitalisations -- one, due to an impending fear of death and the other, due to intolerance to oral corticosteroids.
In contrast to the conventional domiciliary care for COVID-19, in VCIP, corticosteroids, oral anticoagulants, injectable medications such as Low Molecular Weight Heparin were given at home itself by training the patients via WhatsApp video/ Zoom video consultations. “This model is extremely cheap and economic, when compared to hospitalisation and can be remotely managed with a small team of experts who can take care of hundreds of patients. However, this model can be executed only in those patients who have sufficient literacy and motivation, to monitor all the five vital parameters in their houses such as pulse rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, temperature, and blood glucose,” Dr. Kesavadev said.
An international team of experts, including Dr. Hari Parameswaran from Wisconsin, and Dr. Rebecca Vitale from Boston, both in the U.S., were involved in conceptualising the treatment.
