Nouveal e-santé

Challenge:

France has been one of the countries in Europe hardest hit by the coronavirus. Yet, with more than 30,000 deaths to date, the country has seen promising decreases in its daily count of new cases, even in hotspots like Paris ⁠— thanks, in part, to rapid technological innovation from Covidom, an application developed by Nouveal e-santé and the French Ministry of Health.

Back in March, if you were diagnosed with COVID-19 by a doctor in Paris, you would then receive a text message from Covidom designed to guide you through your next two weeks in quarantine. Each day, you would be asked to complete a questionnaire generated by the app, allowing you to exchange information with healthcare professionals about indicators like muscular pain, difficulty eating, and heart rate. Your response would trigger one of three status alerts: Green, and you’re good. Orange, and you’ll get a call from a doctor within a few hours. Red, and you’re called by the emergency line within minutes.

“Nouveal teams are working at 200, 300% because they want to help improve the quality of life for patients and healthcare professionals who were facing these challenges in this major health crisis.”

Guillaume Fayolle

Co-founder @Nouveal e-santé

As of September, the Covidom app was supporting 186,000 patients, with 1,650,000 questionnaires completed, enabling patients to manage the virus themselves and reducing strain on the city's hospitals. Today, Covidom is available across France ⁠— with interest growing in other countries including the United States. ⁠Of course, this tremendous growth has had numerous benefits for the growing company, but it’s also meant rapid iteration and problem-solving as the startup scaled to accommodate new healthcare organizations coming aboard the platform. But, by optimizing Covidom’s performance along the way, Nouveal e-santé has hit major milestones on its high-speed journey to adoption of the app.

All this, in less than six months.

This is an amazing feat of agility by Nouveal e-santé, and AppDynamics was honored to be along for the ride ⁠— so we wanted to take a few minutes in this video to highlight Nouveal e-santé’s achievements on their path to massive growth and the tremendous impact on healthcare.

About Nouveal e-santé

Based in Lyon, Nouveal e-santé is a French SME that develops digital solutions in connected health. Both a software publisher and a digital service provider, Nouveal e-santé markets e-fitback, ONCO'nect, Léa Santé and, more recently, Covidom solutions. Its expertise in the design of e-health solutions and in the management of deployment projects has enabled it to support several public and private players in the health world in their projects.

Solution: AppDynamics helps Nouveal e-santé and public health institutions to scale its Covidom app, allowing safe and accurate remote monitoring

The story of the genesis of Covidom begins with a telemedicine platform called e-fitback, created by then-fledgling tech startup Nouveal e-santé back in 2015 to follow patients recovering from surgery.

By March 2020, Nouveal e-santé was backed by more than five years of expertise working on the digitization of patient journeys through e-fitback. Nouveal e-santé had also recently established a relationship with the largest hospital system in Europe, Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris (or AP-HP), whose IT department was in touch about working together on implementing Nouveal e-santé’s remote monitoring solution in another field, oncology. Little did the company know how these experiences would uniquely prepare them to tackle a new challenge: the containment of a global contagion.

That’s why it made sense for AP-HP to approach Nouveal e-santé for help as the coronavirus began to proliferate France. It was on March 1, during his leave of absence on a remote mountain retreat, that Nouveal e-santé co-founder Alexandre Falzon got the call.

“We’re in an unprecedented health crisis,” the IT manager at AP-HP explained. “Can you adapt e-fitback to remotely track patients who have COVID?”

The idea was to quickly free up healthcare organizations from unnecessary visits so they could focus their resources on patients with severe symptoms. And we mean quickly. In the space of three days following that roadmap-defining call, Nouveal e-santé had partnered with Paris university hospitals to adapt e-fitback into what now know as Covidom, which was approved by AP-HP on March 4. By March 9, the solution was in production.

Benefits: How Covidom evolved from local patient home monitoring to national widespread platform supporting the public health strategy against coronavirus

At first, e-fitback was designed to connect healthcare professionals with patients who had been admitted through ER or a hospital consultation. What Nouveal e-santé hadn’t foreseen, of course, was the need to treat COVID-19 patients who would also be admitted by general practitioners, and the need for those doctors to work closely with hospitals in the race to stamp out the virus. The first challenge was to make the platform available to all doctors, GPs included, as quickly as possible.

At that stage it was important to keep the platform’s features simple. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Nouveal e-santé reused much of the code from e-fitback. But much has changed since then.

“Lockdown has allowed us to get ahead of the curve and to anticipate the future features that are being implemented — and have been implemented — in part for the end of lockdown.”

Guillaume Fayolle

Co-founder @Nouveal e-santé

“Nouveal teams are working at 200, 300% because they want to help improve the quality of life for patients and healthcare professionals who were facing these challenges in this major health crisis,” says Falzon’s co-founder, Guillaume Fayolle.

Today, Covidom has been around for a little under six months, and has evolved with growing needs to consist of three modules: remote medical monitoring, for which the platform was designed from the beginning; service logistics, enabling partners and service providers to monitor patients’ needs during quarantine (food or social services, for example); and third, contact tracing for people who have come into contact with someone recently diagnosed with COVID-19, enabling doctors to detect symptoms that would indicate they have been infected. The goal now is not just to track symptoms ⁠— it’s to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 once the nationwide lockdown ends.

“Lockdown has allowed us to get ahead of the curve and to anticipate the future features that are being implemented — and have been implemented — in part for the end of lockdown,” says Fayolle.

Covidom “can now support the public health strategy, support our citizens, and support the country, both with regard to remote monitoring of infected patients and also in the context of ending lockdown. This is the evolution that has been brought to the platform."

Alexandre Falzon, Co-founder, Nouveal e-santé

So far, he notes, AppDynamics has been able to make “significant contributions to ensuring the scalability of the platform.” With the help of AppDynamics performance monitoring, Nouveal e-santé has been able to:

Perform real-time surveillance of their apps as they develop new features
Reduce average response times from 1,500 milliseconds to 110 milliseconds
Go from serving 20,000 patients a year to 20,000 patients in just two hours

The result? Covidom “can now support the public health strategy, support our citizens, and support the country, both with regard to remote monitoring of infected patients and also in the context of ending lockdown,” says Falzon. “This is the evolution that has been brought to the platform.”