Table 5.

Summary of Clinician Themes and Illustrative Interview Excerpts

	Illustrative Clinician Excerpts
Sentiments about Covid Watch
Comforting	“Knowing that the patients are going to have guaranteed follow-up is a huge - it makes it much more comfortable discharging those borderline patients and knowing that that follow-up will be daily and continuous.” (Emergency department administrator)
Increased Access to Care for Patients	“I used it a lot, because it gives me something for patients who I don’t have a relationship, it gives me some way to hand them off as a safety net for their care. A lot of my patients don’t have primary care, don’t have access to the system I don’t follow them longitudinally. So, it really was a nice mechanism for them to be at least tied in for care during their very nervous time when they had COVID.” (Emergency department clinician)
Reduced Follow-up Burden	“[COVID Watch] really let me focus on other patients and not following up with the same [ones]. I know that sounds tough, but timing is always difficult. And we always have more patients call in, so it kind of allowed me to pass off the COVID-positive patient, knowing that someone was going to check on them no matter what.” (Primary care clinician)
Feedback for Improving COVID Watch
Improve the Enrollment Process	“I think [enrolling patients] was like a little bit of a struggle in the beginning. It can be hard to find the right part of the EMR where you enroll patient with the COVID Watch… [when] I started trying to use it on my own, little bit of a struggle, but then I got like another email from [Colleague] and it solidified how to use it. And then I started using it more regularly. Having said that, even now, I still sometimes can’t find how to enroll patients and so I have to like, look for it a little bit, but it only takes me a few clicks before I find it.” (Primary care clinician)
Provide Solutions for Patients with Limited Device Access or Hesitancy	““Maybe make it if the patient doesn’t know how to text, you guys have someone call or don’t make them text… it might be beneficial to have like, it’s like an 85-year-old that still living by themselves can’t text, they switch it to a phone call.” (Primary care clinician)
Address Low-Literacy and Language Preferences Among Patients	“Having access to other languages would have been really meaningful. And I think that there was definitely some wide loss in not having other languages available…” (Emergency department clinician)
Create a Feedback Loop for Clinicians	“[I’d suggest] a report at the end. I don’t know if you’d want to do it every day, but maybe once a week, or once every two weeks, [send] a report of what patients were reached out to and if you have any issues or improving, just so that we’re aware that it is still being done.” (Primary care clinician)
Clinician Perspectives on the Future of Remote Patient Monitoring
Enhanced Data Collection	“I thought that the implementation of the home pulse oximeter was really helpful. Because I felt like people would say that they were short of breath, but then their number was reassuring. We expected people to get short of breath and we expected people to have some discomfort, but having a very clear number that they could use was helpful. I think that that’s actual data that’s being referred back to the nurse and/or chat system, you know… That enabled the other side of the message to get real information rather than ‘I feel’, and…[being able to] give objective data is obviously helpful.” (Emergency department clinician)
A Guide for Patients	“Knowing when [a patient] needs to get escalated to a phone call is important. In other words, when [patient care] needs to move off the texting medium and move away from a text bot and towards just a conversation on the phone. Having the right threshold there is important. [With COVID Watch]…there were…even more robust contact with healthcare providers.” (Emergency department administrator)
Extend Remote Patient Monitoring to Non-COVID-19 Conditions	“From an Emergency Department aspect, I mean, the one I guess– from other types of infections, so not just COVID, but anyone we discharge on antibiotics, we could do kind of a sepsis initiative kind of thing to prevent progression of illness and to prevent antibiotic failure, so kind of check in…So I would say, off the top of my head, that’s probably the highest yield from an Emergency Department perspective and can probably prevent readmissions and even prevent death, potentially.” (Emergency department leader)