Advancements in digital technologies, alongside increasing digitization in other industries and the global pandemic of COVID-19, have accelerated the adoption of novel health care pathways worldwide, with health care delivery transitioning beyond the traditional face-to-face model [1,2]. Telemedicine has gained long overdue exposure during a complicated crisis; since the onset of the pandemic, digital modalities have become critical in moderating exposure risk to health care staff, reducing community spread, and delivering quality health care remotely to exposed or infected individuals [3,4].

Remote monitoring solutions are being established internationally to allow individuals to continue living at home rather than in expensive hospital facilities, using noninvasive digital technologies (eg, wearable sensors) to collect health data and support health care provider assessment and clinical decision-making [5-9].

Wearable sensors, including patches, smart watches, clothing, and bands, can continuously register vital parameters (eg, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, and temperature) [10-14]. With the advances in technology miniaturization, sensors have become increasingly portable, unobtrusive, lightweight, and waterproof, offering an emerging solution to the continuous remote monitoring of vital signs. It is predicated that continuous monitoring will offer an opportunity for earlier clinical intervention through the earlier recognition of clinical deterioration, thereby improving patient care and patient outcomes, although it remains unclear whether the need for continuous monitoring for ambulatory patients is clinically meaningful [15].

Patient attitudes toward continuous remote monitoring in acute settings have been previously studied [16-18]. Although the work lacks external validity and has inherent selection bias, an insight into barriers and facilitators of continuous remote monitoring has been provided. More recently, a study reported favorable staff perceptions on the use of remote monitoring technologies in an acute surgical ward. Despite this however, the same cohort found no clinical benefit with varied engagement from health care staff, suggesting the need for the further exploration of implementation issues [19,20]. Within the United Kingdom, widespread digital transformations are facilitated by National Health Service (NHS) Digital—a nondepartmental public body created by statute that delivers large health informatics programs [21,22].

Digitally ready services, mature services, and data-enabled services are three ambitions listed by NHS England that form the basis of a digital framework for supporting digitization [23]. In addition, NHS England has supported virtual ward implementation, further indicating the future push toward digitization [24]. Therefore, there is a pressing need to understand key stakeholder perceptions to ensure the successful implementation of such services.

As such, our study aims to investigate key stakeholder perspectives, at the organizational level, on implementing remote monitoring solutions, given the pandemic, in the NHS to identify factors that could affect successful execution and adoption.

Enrollment is currently underway, having started in February 2022. It is anticipated to end in July 2022, with data analysis scheduled to occur in August 2022.

Our study has the potential to identify barriers and facilitators of implementing remote monitoring solutions within an NHS trust. It will lay a road map based on the collated experiences of key stakeholders for the future deployment of remote monitoring solutions, thereby improving widespread adoption.

Indeed, a recent study highlighted the effectiveness of such solutions in patients with COVID-19, although the study noted the limited number of high-quality trial designs, which were heterogenous in nature [32]. The pandemic has resulted in heightened interest in public health research with models for implementing pulse oximetry. Given this digital acceleration, further research into implementation strategies are of growing importance [33,34].

Our study will be limited to the implementation of remote monitoring solutions, and the findings may not be generalizable to other digital solutions nor to other health care settings. Moreover, nonprobabilistic sampling may result in selection bias. Despite this, our use of semistructured interviews to capture stakeholder perceptions may yield pertinent considerations for the pragmatic implementation of remote monitoring, and the broad heterogenous sample of key stakeholders we hope to include may identify issues that are generalizable to the implementation of other technologies—an area of paucity within the current literature and an area of growing importance, given the favorable patient attitudes toward continuous remote monitoring [16-18]. Lastly, the viewpoints of end users will not be examined in this study, as this has been done elsewhere [19,35]. As such, a top-down view has been provided herein.

In conclusion, the results of our study could offer insight into highlighting key barriers and facilitators to implementing digital remote monitoring solutions, thereby allowing for improved widespread adoption within the NHS in the future.