COVID Watch Study: Pulse Oximeters Shown Not to Improve Outcomes for Patients with COVID-19 Recovering at Home
About Us
- About PCORI
- The PCORI Strategic Plan
- Governance
- Evaluating Our Work
- PCORI's Advisory Panels
- Procurement Opportunities
- Provide Input
- Leadership
Image
Patients with COVID-19 who were remotely monitored at home using a text-message-based program — known as COVID Watch — did not experience better outcomes if they used a pulse oximeter, according to research findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Supported in part by PCORI funding, the study — led by Mucio Delgado, MD, MS, at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine — compared patients who received standard care as part of the COVID Watch program to patients in the same program who were given a pulse oximeter to monitor their oxygen levels. Researchers found that adding the pulse oximeter did not save more lives or keep more people out of the hospital.
About the COVID Watch Study
The study involved two interventions/comparitors: Part 1 of the study looked at remote home monitoring versus no remote home monitoring. Part 2 of the study looked at usual care with remote home monitoring versus usual care with remote home monitoring and the the use of a fingertip pulse oximeter. The results summarized above are from part 2 of the study. Click here to read a summary of results from part 1 of the study, which were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2021.
