Remote monitoring for heart-failure patients after discharge

Heart failure is the most common reason for unplanned readmission in the first 90 days after discharge at ZOL, Jessa and AZ Maria Middelares. Together the three hospitals follow more than 1,100 heart-failure patients in their outpatient clinics. Each runs a form of telemonitoring today, mostly a connected scale with a daily questionnaire. Adherence drops after six weeks and nurse-led alarm handling does not scale beyond a few hundred patients.

We are looking for solutions that combine continuous or near-continuous physiological monitoring (weight, heart rate, respiration, activity or thoracic impedance) with an alarm logic that a heart-failure nurse can explain to a patient. Solutions should be at TRL 6 or higher, have a clear MDR route, and be ready to run a multicentre validation study in 2027. Service models where a home-nursing organisation installs and maintains the devices are welcome.

The organising hospitals offer a shared study protocol, one ethics submission by a lead site, access to their heart-failure clinics for recruitment and clinical co-authorship. Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg and i-mens support home logistics in the study regions. The call is linked to a VLAIO TETRA application prepared by ZOL and UHasselt; selected companies join the user committee of that project.

Submit through the regular intake form, pre-tagged with this call, before 31 October 2026. Every submission gets a pitch slot on a Friday afternoon in November. The organising hospitals give consolidated feedback by 15 December 2026 and select up to three solutions for the 2027 study.