Many peo­ple, my­self in­clud­ed, didn’t even know that the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty had a mo­bile app avail­able un­til it was men­tioned two weeks ago at one of the Min­istry of Health brief­in­gs. The Pre­view by NCRHA app has been avail­able in the Google Play store since last Au­gust al­though, judg­ing by the num­ber of down­loads, it’s not been a very pop­u­lar down­load. The NCRHA bills it as a dig­i­tal plat­form to ‘man­age your at-home well­ness state’ so when I got di­ag­nosed with COVID-19 last week, I de­cid­ed to try it out. Here’s what my ex­pe­ri­ence was like down­load­ing and us­ing it. 

Signup was su­per sim­ple and didn’t re­quire a lot of in­for­ma­tion. Just my name, a pin, DOB, phone num­ber, and an op­tion­al email ad­dress. I re­alised lat­er on that they use the phone num­ber to con­tact you (more on that lat­er) so make sure you en­ter one that is reach­able. 

Once my signup was com­plete, a quick guide to the app’s func­tions popped up. Even though I don’t need it, I like that they in­clud­ed the ‘Read Aloud’ op­tion for the menus as ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty for all is not one of T&T’s strong points. The app al­so asked me to en­able my lo­ca­tion and no­ti­fi­ca­tions. To date, I haven’t got a no­ti­fi­ca­tion but I’m not sure if that’s the app or my phone be­ing bug­gy.

Quick guide com­plete, the wel­come screen loaded up. As it was my first time us­ing the app, I didn’t have a last check­up to view so I chose the ‘Get a check­up’ op­tion. 

The Check­up tool again of­fered me the op­tion to en­able ‘voice over’ at the start of the process and then asked a se­ries of ques­tions about my age group, state of well­ness, and read­ing from a Blood Oxy­gen (SpO2) me­ter if avail­able. There’s no way to get back to a pre­vi­ous ques­tion though, press­ing back took me right back to the home screen which is a lit­tle te­dious but see­ing that there are on­ly 6 ques­tions any­way, it’s on­ly a mild an­noy­ance. 

Once all the in­for­ma­tion is in, the fi­nal screen let me know my sta­tus. In this case, I didn’t need to con­tact the am­bu­lance or be hos­pi­talised based on my re­spons­es. I fin­ished the check­up think­ing that was it.  

A few hours lat­er, a doc­tor from the Ari­ma Hos­pi­tal called to check up on me. He asked a few ques­tions to de­ter­mine my health sta­tus and gave some ad­vice on the signs to look for that would re­quire an am­bu­lance to be called. This was es­pe­cial­ly help­ful as I wasn’t quite sure how I would no­tice a drop in oxy­gen lev­els see­ing that I had no oxime­ter.  

In my ex­pe­ri­ence, a doc­tor called every time I did one of the check­ups but the time­frame var­ied. One call came in as lit­tle as 5 min­utes af­ter fin­ish­ing the check­up but gen­er­al­ly, it took 4-5 hours to re­ceive a call. Even though the NCRHA says it will in­ter­vene, if nec­es­sary, the app doesn’t al­low you to call from with­in it so if you are in dis­tress make the call your­self... don’t wait! 

Tip: Some of the doc­tor’s calls have come from pri­vate num­bers so don’t ig­nore the call. 

There is al­so a sec­tion with COVID-19 tips which in­cludes es­sen­tial con­tact num­bers and tips on pre­vent­ing spread. The sec­tions about pre­vent­ing spread had good iconog­ra­phy but part of the text was hid­den by the ‘learn more’ op­tion which doesn’t seem to be linked to any­thing so I couldn’t in fact... learn more.  

The app is small and light­weight, com­ing in at on­ly 31MB so it doesn’t take up too much space on your phone. It’s avail­able for any­one run­ning An­droid ver­sion 5.0 and up on­ly, no word yet on if/when an iOS ver­sion will be avail­able.  

Is the app per­fect? No. There are sev­er­al things that could be in­clud­ed to make the ex­pe­ri­ence bet­ter, in­clud­ing an SOS but­ton and work­ing links in the ‘COVID-19 Tips’ sec­tion. The app al­so doesn’t seem to re­mem­ber the user, so you have to log in every time and it couldn’t seem to find my check­up records when I tried to ac­cess it. 

How­ev­er, I would still say it’s a pret­ty sol­id app and the fact that a doc­tor calls every time you use the check­up func­tion makes it a worth­while down­load if you fall un­der the NCRHA’s ju­ris­dic­tion.