Implementing a Home Blood Pressure Monitoring Program in Primary Care

Hypertension guidelines now strongly recommend that patients with hypertension monitor their blood pressure (BP) at home (i.e., home BP monitoring; HBPM) as an approach to improving BP control so long as HBPM is conducted with clinical support (i.e., supported HBPM). Yet, few health systems have systematically implemented HBPM programs, and less than 20% of hypertensive patients routinely measure their BP at home, resulting in a gap in the translation of evidence-based recommendations into practice.

While there is strong evidence for Supported HBPM from pragmatic randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the evidence has been generated from the subgroup of patients and clinicians who volunteered to participate in trials, and the sample sizes have been in the hundreds of patients. There remains a gap in assessing the effectiveness of a scaled-up HBPM program that seeks to maximize the enrollment of primary care patients with uncontrolled hypertension.

Accordingly, in partnership with health system leaders at New York-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP), Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Weill Cornell Medicine, the study investigator leveraged a system-wide investment in telemedicine to develop a telemonitoring-enabled Supported HBPM program. The Supported HBPM program consists of two options for obtaining electronic health record (EHR)-integrated home BP data. The low resource intensity option is designed for patients that can obtain valid home BP devices and are comfortable using the patient portal. It includes digital support to prompt patients to track their home BP readings in the patient portal using their own BP devices with automated triage support for extreme readings. The high resource intensity option is designed for patients that need additional support with HBPM. It involves navigator support with obtaining and using loaned home BP devices that wirelessly transmit data into the EHR and nursing support to triage extreme readings. Both programs can be ordered by clinicians in the EHR and both provide clinicians with weekly summaries of home BP readings with average home BP already calculated.

The study investigator concurrently followed a theory-driven process (the Behavior Change Wheel) to develop an implementation strategy aimed at increasing uptake of the Supported HBPM program. The study investigator now plans to implement and evaluate the Supported HBPM program across practices in the NYP, Weill Cornell Medicine, and ColumbiaDoctors primary care network which is comprised of a socioeconomically diverse patient population.

The study will evaluate the program by conducting a parallel-group cluster randomized trial in which 15 practices will be matched and then randomly assigned to early implementation of the Supported HBPM program (intervention) versus usual care with delayed implementation (i.e., wait-list control). Data will be retrospectively collected from a 12 month period before implementation (pre-implementation periods) as well as from a 12 month period after implementation (post-implementation period) to assess outcomes.

If successful, this project will provide a roadmap for widely implementing an EHR-integrated Supported HBPM program, and will accelerate a change in the paradigm of hypertension management from the office to the home.