Home-based hypertension program produces 'striking' results

Hypertension or high blood pressure is a common clinical problem affecting nearly half of adults. Although high blood pressure can lead to serious consequences, the risk of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular events increases, but elevated blood pressure is often untreated or treated for many years, and the control rate for hypertension is only 50%. Seeing opportunities for improvement, innovators and clinicians at Brigham and Women's Hospital have developed a new home-based care program designed to rapidly increase the rate of hypertension control at a much lower cost than traditional Office blood pressure plan. The new method was piloted among 130 participants, helping 81% of patients to control their blood pressure on average for only 7 weeks. The results of this pilot study were published this week in the journal Clinical Cardiology.