On 23 January 2020, the first index case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in Hong Kong. Since then, the number of cases has risen at an alarming rate. In anticipation of the outbreak, the Hospital Authority in Hong Kong actively cut down clinic sessions since February 2020 to reduce clinic attendances and hospital admissions in order to reduce cross infection among patients.
Every year there are some 13.5 million attendances in the outpatient clinic across 7 clusters in the Hospital Authority. COVID-19 has severely disrupted the public healthcare services, leading to accumulating clinic caseload and potentially delay in diagnosis and treatment.
With the tremendous support from the Information Technology and Health Informatics team of Hospital Authority Head Office, United Christian Hospital and Tseung Kwan O Hospital were the first hospitals in Hong Kong to pilot the use of telemedicine during COVID-19 to mitigate the service disruption. At the early phase, Zoom was adopted as the official app for telemedicine. However, there were concerns over the potential vulnerability with Zoom and patients’ privacy. A series of security assessments on the Zoom client was performed to ensure that patient’s data were encrypted, and vulnerabilities had been resolved. Zoom client was subsequently incorporated into HA Go, the official app of Hospital Authority. Patients could attend a tele-consultation through the HA Go app. The app had a comprehensive list of functions, including making future appointments, delivering health educational videos to patients via push notifications, payment, checking of the latest investigation results and appointments. All these minimize patients’ stay in the hospital and thus avoid exposing them to the coronavirus. Here we share our experience in the Kowloon East Cluster on developing and implementing a telemedicine program for public health care service.
