Performance and Safety of the ANTALGEEK® Thess Monitoring Medical Device in the Outpatient Management of Acute Pain and Postoperative Recovery

Plain-language summary

Acute postoperative pain (APOP) is a major public health problem, affecting nearly 10 million patients in France each year. Effective analgesic therapy in the first postoperative week is a key factor in reducing early postoperative morbidity and mortality. Poorly controlled APOP is a major risk factor for chronic postoperative pain. In France today, more and more patients undergo surgical procedures as outpatients. The challenge is to manage postoperative pain in the homes of patients who have undergone increasingly complex surgical procedures, either after outpatient surgery or after a prompt return home as part of an Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) protocol. In outpatient surgery, postoperative pain management requires new strategies and/or organizational approaches to ensure high-quality pain management from the very start. The principle of analgesia for acute postoperative pain recommends: i) routine, fixed-schedule maintenance therapy; and ii) rescue therapy if maintenance therapy is insufficient, based on pain titration, using mild or strong oral opioids. Postoperative pain is the primary focus of postoperative care but the goal is also to improve postoperative recovery and enhance the patient's overall care. To date, there are no medical telemonitoring devices to support the patient in properly taking their analgesics based on multiple-daily assessments of the efficacy and tolerability of the analgesic treatment, enabling systematic postoperative screening for early and late warning signs of the risk of chronic pain. The Thess Monitoring device, which implements the ANTALGEEK® protocol, (TMA) was developed to optimize the efficiency of outpatient management of acute postoperative pain. It improves patients' adherence to maintenance treatment with adaptive, personalized control of analgesia through better use of opioid rescue therapy, and the reduction of adverse effects associated with improper opioid use (under- or over-dosing). The aim is to ensure optimal pain resolution and improve early and late postoperative recovery during the first postoperative week. The TMA system enables remote monitoring of the efficacy and tolerability of analgesic treatment, as well as early and late warning signs of the risk of chronic pain. By measuring pain scores daily during the first postoperative week, it identifies patients with a suboptimal pain trajectory who are at high risk of developing persistent pain beyond the third month. It also assesses warning signs of the risk of chronic pain (neuropathic pain, persistent opioid use) at intervals following the procedure (Day 8, Month 1, Month 2, Month 3). Improving the patient care pathway via the TMA system should make it possible to better coordinate postoperative follow-up between hospital-based and community-based care.

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