A Study on a Digital Platform for COVID19+ Patients, Designed to Facilitate Communication and Mental-health Care During and After Hospitalization.

Overview

This study presents a digital mental-health protocol designed to offer remote, personalized support to former or current COVID-19 patients. A total of 100 subjects will be enrolled. Participation is voluntary, and an extended informed-consent form is signed before any evaluation, assessment or voice/video call. Consent forms are collected remotely for those who have been discharged and are currently in remission and in-person for subjects hospitalized in a COVID-19-ward of either pneumology, internal medicine or infectious disease departments. Efforts will be made to assess all participants who have completed the minimum required intervention activities: for DigiCOVID, minimum required intervention activities include attending psychotherapy sessions at least 4 times. As the main goal of this project is to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability and usability of DigiCOVID, the investigators will conduct an analysis of the following primary outcome measures in all ITT participants: 1. Assessment of completion rate. Based on our previous studies, the investigators expect that ≥80% of participants will complete the battery of online self-reports: 2. Usability ratings obtained post-DigiCOVID via a 7-point Likert-scale questionnaire (mean rating of all responses). This is a brief and embedded post-study questionnaire on program satisfaction, clarity, and perceived benefits. Participants will rate each sentence on the following 7-point Likert scale: 1 = Completely Agree; 2 = Mostly Agree; 3 = Somewhat Agree; 4 = Undecided; 5 = Somewhat Disagree; 6 = Mostly Disagree; 7 = Completely Disagree. Based on our previous studies, the investigators hypothesize exit survey ratings of at least ≥4.5 ±1.5 on the 7-point Likert scale items; 3. Reported side effects (raw score). Based on our previous findings, the investigators expect 0 adverse events due to program use; 4. Overall program completion rate. Based on previous findings, the investigators hypothesize full program completion in ≥70% study participants. The secondary outcome measures will be collected at baseline and immediately after the treatment for all participants. The investigators designed DigiCOVID to improve mental wellbeing. Therefore, the investigators will measure the impact of the intervention by looking at pre-post changes in the following outcome measures: the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) (Goldberg, 1988) , the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) (Weiss \& Marmar, 1997), the General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) (Robert L Spitzer et al., 2006), the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) (Morin et al., 2011), and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) (Kroenke et al., 2001). The investigators expect to observe a significant improvement across all these secondary outcome measures in COVID-19 patients. To verify these experimental hypotheses, the investigators will conduct the analysis based on the pre-intervention (baseline) and post-intervention data using parametric and non parametric statistical tests. The criterion for statistical significance is p \< 0.05. Results with p \< 0.1 will be described as trends.