Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. Consequently, the ongoing recruitment of participants for the INSPIRE study 3 , 4 was temporarily interrupted on March 16th and the future participants programmed until April 30th were postponed 5.
In France, only emergencies were allowed to be physically seen. As an alternative for the other patients, Telemedicine has become essential. France authorized the reimbursement of these new techniques by the National Health Insurance; allowing rapid deployment of online consultations to be used to maintain the level of care 6.
Staff was reduced in order to reinforce the units dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic. For safety reasons all the scheduled visits were maintained, however, to prevent interactions between patients, they were scheduled at a rhythm of one to two visits per day.
On site, we tried to minimize the number of interactions with different staff members. Both patients and staff wore surgical mask and, in order to respect social distancing, each patient was asked to stay in one single room during the visit.
On the other hand, we decided to adapt a research activity based on new technologies. At the beginning of the lockdown, we started by sending a personal courtesy email to each future participant in order to maintain contact. In the few cases where we did not have email contact, the participants were directly called by phone. Consequently, we developed an innovative strategy proposing to test Telemedicine in the INSPIRE study during the coronavirus pandemic for participants who had been canceled.
