Establishment and application of the “electronic follow-up platform for endometriosis” during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The management of endometriosis has been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to introduce the establishment and application of a new follow-up method during the COVID-19 pandemic—the electronic follow-up (e-follow-up) platform for endometriosis—and to test the applicability of the platform-based follow-up management model and patient satisfaction. We used the platform for information entry and post-operative follow-up of 152 patients with endometriosis from January 2021 to August 2022, and compared patients’ Zung’s Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), and Visual Analogue Score (VAS) (range: 0 − 10, indicating: no pain-extreme pain) scores preoperatively and after 6-month of follow-up, together with recording patients’ follow-up satisfaction and number of recurrence of lesions. Eventually, the SDS, SAS, and VAS scores were significantly lower than those at pre-surgery (p < .001), and the follow-up satisfaction rate reached 100%, with 91.41% expressing great satisfaction. The cumulative number of recurrences was 2 out of 138. Follow-up using this platform reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission, enabled more efficient access to healthcare resources for patients with endometriosis, improved the efficiency of follow-up management, met the mental health needs of the patients.

Keywords:

• Endometriosis follow up
• general gynaecology
• pain
• women's health
• mental health

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Professor Guoyun Wang for the guidance on this study, and to Zero Krypton Technology (Beijing) Ltd. for their great help and support in building and applying the platform.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study cannot be shared at this time as the data are also part of an ongoing study.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2022YFC2704000), the Major Basic Research of Natural Science Foundation of Shandong (grant number ZR2021ZD34) and the National Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 82071621).