Continuous patient monitoring after Euroanaesthesia 2026: why the ward should be ready

 

 

At Euroanaesthesia 2026 in Rotterdam, I joined Prof. Akira Poncette and Prof. Osama Bou Arab on the panel about postoperative care hosted by Prof. Joana Berger-Estilita. This piece shares my perspective, shaped in part by conversations with smartQare's clinical and sales teams ahead of the panel. My part of the conversation covered digital health and remote monitoring: the kind of questions that come up in almost every hospital conversation we have and that an hour-long panel never quite has room to answer properly. Here’s where I’ve landed, and what I think they add up to.

 

The questions matter because the pressure on hospital systems isn't easing and postoperative and chronically ill patients keep moving between care stations (high acuity, lower acuity, ward and home) in ways that current monitoring wasn't built to follow. That gap is where most of this discussion lives.

 

Health systems are under enough strain that identifying accessible, affordable monitoring isn't optional. It's an obligation and an opportunity to collaborate across the sector rather than solve this alone. But "ready" depends on what gets built. Taking an ICU monitoring model and shrinking it doesn't work for a patient moving from bed to chair to corridor, on his or her way home rather than staying put. It requires designing around the people living the transition: the patient recovering and the nurse managing a full ward, not just the equipment.

 

That's not a technology gap. Continuous monitoring is already proven to work and is available today. The real challenge is implementation. When a ward adopts it effectively, it reduces the number of manual checks nurses need to perform during a shift, giving them more time to spend on direct patient care.

 

That case is starting to be backed by real numbers. In smartQare's own REQUEST study, we found a 63% reduction in reported nursing workload and roughly 10 minutes saved per patient, per day, on non-value administrative tasks- time that goes back into direct patient care. Broader evidence on continuous monitoring technologies also points to earlier detection of deterioration, safer and earlier discharge, and fewer readmissions to higher-acuity care.

 

Cost, training and trust get called barriers. I'd call them critical success factors.

 

Cost is the easiest to argue on paper: quantify a missed deterioration, an extended stay or an avoidable readmission, and continuous monitoring pays for itself. Compared purely against spot-check monitoring on a capital basis, the numbers won't work. That's the wrong comparison. Capitalise the benefits, positive health outcomes and savings first and the business case holds in almost every case we've seen, provided implementation is done properly.

 

Training is where scaling either happens or stalls. Hospitals that scale successfully run rigorous change management because a nurse needs to trust a new way of working before he or she will rely on it. That’s why we put people on the ground with hospital teams during implementation: redesigning workflows, training staff, staying accountable to outcomes rather than to units shipped.

 

Trust underpins all of it: nurses trusting it won't add to their workload, clinicians trusting the data, institutions trusting the vendor as a long-term partner rather than a one-off sale. All three come back to trusting the data quality itself.

 

If I can add a fourth factor: pilotitis. I’ve worked in telehealth for two decades and the need hasn't changed in that time. What must change is how long we accept endless, isolated pilots as the default, while the positive outcomes are convincing and deserve broad based scaling such to deliver impact at scale.

 

When I'm asked how to bring a hospital's leadership on board, my honest answer is that I don't fully understand the hesitation. The only way we create value for patients and nurses is by collaborating on this, and that takes courage. Courage is leadership.

 

That same leadership question shows up again once you get into the data itself: none of it works without a foundation of quality data. Without that foundation, none of what follows (the alerting, the algorithms, the predictions) is worth much.

 

Continuous monitoring means roughly 1,440 data points a day, compared with three or four spot checks on a typical ward round. That volume only helps if it is matched by intelligent alerting and trend data analysis: surfacing the right signal, to the right person, at the right moment, rather than every reading a sensor produces.

 

One comparison from the panel has stuck with me: intermittent monitoring is a bit like driving down a dark street and only switching your headlights on for a few seconds every so often. You catch glimpses, not the full picture.

 

Data without context isn't worth much, and context without action is just as wasteful, which is why the shift that matters most isn't more data but better algorithms turning that data into something a clinician can act on.

 

That’s also what separates reactive care from predictive care: a longitudinal physiological stream doesn't just raise an alarm after something has gone wrong, it can show a trend heading somewhere you don't want a patient to go, early enough to intervene.

 

One question from the audience got right to the practical edge of this: if a model predicts an 83% chance of deterioration within six hours, is that precise enough to act on? One answer from the panel has stayed with me: monitoring like this isn't going to hand a clinician a diagnosis, and it shouldn't try to. What it can do is flag a problem earlier than we would otherwise have caught it, which is a different, more modest, and more honest promise.

 

None of this happens by one company working alone. It requires open standards and collaboration across the ecosystem, from established names like Philips to newer platforms like Ward 24/7 and Cuviva, so data can move between systems instead of staying locked inside one.

 

Our position: the patient owns their data. The care team uses it. The institution governs it. The vendor has no claim on it. That is not a slogan, it is how we have built our platform, GDPR-compliant by design.

 

It's worth saying we didn't all agree on this at the panel. One view was data belongs to society as a whole, closer to how vaccination works, where the collective benefit only holds if enough people opt in. Another was more institutional: in his hospital, the data lives on the hospital's own cloud infrastructure and belongs to them, used for clinical research, something patients should be told directly. I don't think these positions are as far apart as they sound (all three are really trying to answer the same question, of who's accountable for the data once it exists) but it's a genuine open debate, not something the industry has settled.

 

What the panel agreed on: this isn't really a technology problem anymore. It's a governance problem. The thresholds, the clinical pathways and who's responsible for what is the part still being worked out, not whether the underlying systems can capture and move the data.

 

Clinicians will always interpret the data. What changes is the support they get from algorithms that handle richer, more contextual information than a person tracking trends manually and that don't tire, take breaks or apply inconsistent judgment across a long shift.

 

Governance only matters if the technology reaches the hospitals that need it. The institutions that can most afford sophisticated monitoring systems are often not the ones that need them most, and that keeps me up at night. Wireless, scalable monitoring is part of closing that gap, but only if the industry is honest about implementation support, pricing models and genuine partnership with under-resourced hospitals.

 

This isn't only a gap between hospitals. It's between countries too, and the direction of that gap doesn't always run the way people assume. From what I’ve seen, countries with fewer existing resources sometimes adopt new technology faster, not slower, the same way parts of Africa and India moved to mobile payments well ahead of markets with entrenched banking infrastructure. That view was echoed elsewhere on the panel: technology can help level a playing field that's currently very uneven and, at this stage it's less about the technology itself and more about knowledge, implementation and getting the right stakeholders aligned.

 

Not in a marketing sense. This means interventions tailored to how a specific patient is trending, rather than to a population average.

 

Where this is heading, in my view: continuous ward monitoring stops being something only well-resourced hospitals can offer and becomes standard practice everywhere care happens: in-hospital, hospital-to-home and at home. Big data holds the promise to make healthcare personal in the sense that interventions can be tailored to how a specific patient is trending, not just to a population average.

 

What still needs to change is less about the technology and more about implementation: workflows built around continuous data rather than retrofitted to fit old ones, funding models that account for savings rather than only upfront cost and a genuine commitment to reaching hospitals outside the top tier.

 

By 2030, continuous ward monitoring should be standard, not premium. The technology is here. The evidence is building. What is left is the courage to implement it, the humility to design around people and the honesty to put patients first.

 

If I had to leave the panel with one line, it's the one I actually closed with: let's make it happen.

 

 

smartQare develops wearable continuous patient monitoring technology that gives clinicians real-time visibility into how a patient is doing. Our goal is to help healthcare professionals detect deterioration earlier, support clinical decision-making and improve patient care while fitting into existing clinical workflows rather than adding to them. We are not simply building a wearable; we are working on the same problem this panel spent an hour discussing: how continuous, connected data reaches the people who need to act on it. 

 

Want to continue the conversation? 

 

Read the event recap, listen to the full panel conversation or get in touch to talk through what continuous ward monitoring could look like in your setting.