Yesterday's Kassensturz on SRF addressed the difficult situation of people affected by Long COVID who are dependent on support by the disability insurance (IV). You can watch the full report here.
In the report, four people affected by Long COVID describe their experiences. People who were active and at the prime of their life before the infection suddenly had to stay in bed for weeks or longer and are dependent on intensive care and support. All of this without much prospect of a soon recovery, as treatment options are limited and in many cases very expensive.
This difficult situation is exacerbated by financial worries and a lack of support from the IV. Those affected recount extremely long waiting times, rejections without an underlying expert opinion and a lack of recognition of existing medical reports. Some of them are accused of violating their duty to cooperate because they were unable to keep appointments due to their illness.
The head of the Federal Social Insurance Office, Florian Steinbacher, comments on these accusations in Kassensturz. The conclusion, however, is more than sobering: IV procedures take a very long time – deliberately so. Examinations to assess who is actually entitled to a pension are very time-consuming and this is not supposed to change.
"The IV process will not speed up in the foreseeable future," says Steinbacher
The report shows that one of the major problems is the lack of standardization in the diagnosis of Long COVID. This leads to an arduous process of numerous medical examinations, some of which are almost impossible to carry out for those affected. These consultations often lead to crashes and thus further impair the state of health of Long COVID patients.
To counteract precisely this situation, a working group from the Swiss Insurance Medicine (SIM) including Swiss experts has developed the Evidence-based Post COVID Assessment (EPOCA). The EPOCA assessment provides a diagnostic evaluation of Long COVID that could simplify and standardize medical assessments. Unfortunately, the EPOCA assessment is currently hardly used due to a lack of capacity on the part of the medical professionals.
In collaboration with the SIM and Altea, movos AG has developed Altea Care. The app makes it possible to carry out the EPOCA assessment digitally. This allows those affected to complete a large part of this extensive questionnaire at home at their own pace. The assessment can be interrupted at any time and continued at a later timepoint. This avoids crashes caused by long, stressful consultations. The patient's entries can then be securely transmitted digitally to the practitioners for evaluation. The assessment is completed in a subsequent consultation.
This "pre-work" from the patients saves a significant amount of time for practitioners, medical officers, and independent medical examiners. At the same time, the EPOCA assessment provides a comprehensive report on the patient's state of health, which creates the data basis for an objective evaluation and reduces variability in reporting.
During the broadcast of this episode of Kassensturz and afterwards, viewers had the opportunity to ask four experts questions on the topic in a live chat. One of the chairwomen of the patient organization Long COVID Switzerland, Manuela Bieri, the lawyer Dominik Sennhauser from the support group Procap Switzerland, the specialist lawyer for SAV liability and insurance law Sebastian Lorentz and the specialist for internal medicine at the USB Katrin Bopp spend 2 hours answering the questions of people affected by Long COVID and their relatives.
