Quality-of-life in patients with long COVID: harnessing the scale of big data to quantify the health and economic costs

We want to understand the impacts of long COVID on the quality-of-life of people who have developed this condition. For many health conditions, researchers ask people to fill in standardised surveys which measure quality-of-life, which help them understand how much the condition is affecting people. These kinds of measures are used in planning the resources for health systems, because they allow a standard way of comparing different health conditions, and, if people fill them in repeatedly, tracking changes in wellbeing over time. These quality-of-life measurements are not currently available for people with long COVID who did not need to be hospitalised during their COVID-19 episode. Our study aims to collect these measurements, by using a smartphone app linked to a patient s GP records. We will ask people to voluntarily participate in the study and use the app, and if they do so to give their consent for filling the questionnaires and for linkage to their health records. These results will tell us if long COVID has different quality-of-life impacts among different age groups, ethnicities, geographic regions, or because of any underlying health conditions. We will convert the results into standardised measurements that are used in the NHS to assess the impact of illnesses. This means they will be useful for working out how much the effects of long COVID cost the health service, and how we should prioritise interventions such as vaccines to avoid more people getting long COVID. Together with other researchers studying long COVID we will provide results to support long-term care. At all stages we will work with people affected by long COVID to ensure their input is central to designing the study plans and interpreting the outputs.