JSE-listed private healthcare group Netcare has partnered with Dutch medical technology company Corsano Health to bring full-time diagnostics through wearable devices to its hospitals and clinics in South Africa.
Netcare CEO Dr Richard Friedland said the partnership will allow for continuous patient monitoring and offer “numerous benefits” to Netcare’s staff and patients alike, including flipping the group’s in-patient care operations from a reactive to a predictive model.
Friedland said in a statement on Tuesday that the roll-out of wearable devices for all patients in Netcare’s general wards is “imminent”. These wards have around 6 000 beds across the country.
“These devices will offer continuous, clinical-grade monitoring of all key vital signs 24 hours a day. There are numerous benefits to continuous patient monitoring, which will integrate with our electronic medical record platform to substantially improve the quality of care, safety and clinical outcomes of our patients,” he said.
The devices measure key metrics including blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, skin and core body temperature, and cardiac arrhythmias and atrial fibrillation. Once fully deployed, the wearables will be worn by Netcare patients in general wards as well as those in maternity, psychiatry and rehabilitation wards.
Functionality
Corsano’s wearables stream diagnostic data to the company’s cloud platform before it is shared with Netcare’s own medical records system. According to the statement, some of the functionality this integration will enable includes:
- Automated early warning scores and predictive risk algorithms
- Centralised monitoring and alerting beyond intensive- and high-care units
- Reduced manual vital-sign documentation burden for nursing staff
- High-resolution datasets that can power clinical research and AI-driven innovation
- Non-invasive monitoring of key patient metrics
According to Dr Chris Mathew, MD of cancer care and business development at Netcare, the choice to partner with Corsano was driven by the medical-grade certification of its products and the comprehensiveness of the health metrics the devices are capable of monitoring.
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“There are many consumer-grade wearables in the market and relatively few that are medical grade. Importantly, what they also have that a lot of other medical-grade devices don’t have is the full suite of vitals monitoring,” said Mathew.
“Heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature and oxygen saturation are fairly common on a lot of devices. But the one thing they really stand out in is their cuffless blood pressure monitoring which uses photoplethysmography technology.”
Corsano’s devices have the look and feel of a smartwatch, but unlike consumer-grade wearables the watch face does not have a screen or any other interactive features such as lights or vibration. Mathew said this is so patients are not made anxious by monitoring their own vitals such as their heart rate suddenly spiking, for example.
The strap for the device is made of silicon, which is non-toxic, non-irritating and less likely to cause allergic reactions. To maintain data privacy, data sent to Corsano’s cloud environment is anonymised. When the data is shared back to Netcare, a device ID is used to match the information with the patient it belongs to.
The move is part of Netcare’s broader push to use digital tools to “establish a new standard of continuous monitoring” in general wards in South Africa and internationally. Mathew said Netcare aims to offer consumer-grade wearables outside of the clinical environment to give the group a holistic view of patient health that allows for deeper levels of predictive healthcare.
“This opens the door for us to engage with the patient beyond the hospital setting across the entire continuum of care and all the way into their home. We can then move to a model that provides holistic care that is augmented by technology,” said Mathew. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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