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

The problem of acute postoperative pain (APOP) is a major public health problem, affecting nearly 10 million patients in France each year and potentially leading to numerous complications when inadequately managed. In the postoperative period, the implementation of effective analgesic therapy is a key factor in reducing early postoperative morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, poorly controlled PPS is one of the major risk factors for the development of chronic postoperative pain (CPOP). Optimizing analgesic medication to prevent an abnormal pain trajectory during the first postoperative week is a key strategy for preventing chronic postoperative pain.

Today, within the French healthcare system, an increasing number of patients undergo surgical procedures performed on an outpatient basis. The big challenge is to manage postoperative pain in the homes of patients who have undergone increasingly complex surgical procedures, either following outpatient surgery or after an early return home as part of an Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) protocol.

In outpatient surgery, improving postoperative pain management requires the implementation of new strategies and/or organizational approaches to ensure a high-quality pain management pathway from the very beginning.

The principle of analgesia for acute postoperative pain recommends a combination of: i) routine, fixed-schedule maintenance therapy; and ii) rescue therapy-if maintenance therapy is insufficient-based on the principle of pain titration, using oral opioids (mild or strong). While postoperative pain remains the primary focus of postoperative care, the goal is also to improve postoperative recovery more broadly and thereby enhance the patient's overall care.

The assessment of postoperative recovery in outpatient surgery patients using a medical telemonitoring device is associated with a reduction in discomfort caused by various postoperative symptoms, including postoperative pain. However, to date, there is no medical telemonitoring device that both supports the patient in properly taking their analgesics based on multiple-daily assessments of the efficacy and tolerability of the analgesic treatment, and enables systematic postoperative screening for early and late warning signs of the risk of chronic pain.

To this end, the Thess Monitoring medical telemonitoring device (which implements the ANTALGEEK® protocol) (TMA) was developed. It is a tool for continuous therapeutic support and postoperative telemonitoring designed to optimize the efficiency of outpatient management of acute postoperative pain in patients by improving adherence to maintenance therapy, adaptive and 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), with the goal of ensuring optimal pain resolution and improved early and late postoperative recovery during the first postoperative week (Baseline-Day 7). To achieve this, 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: identify, through daily measurement of pain scores during the first postoperative week, patients with a suboptimal pain trajectory who are at high risk of developing persistent postoperative pain beyond the third month; assess 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 through the TMA system should thus make it possible to better coordinate postoperative follow-up between hospital-based and community-based care.

In this initial proof-of-concept study, the investigators aim to evaluate the performance and safety of the TMA medical device in the outpatient management of acute pain during the first postoperative week, as well as its impact on postoperative recovery and on reducing the risk of pain becoming chronic by the third postoperative month.