Hypertension affects 116 million adults in the United States and is a major risk factor for heart disease, kidney disease, and stroke. This “silent killer” contributes to the death of nearly 500,000 Americans annually. Mature guidelines and performance measures reflect the efficacy and value of blood pressure control. Guidelines now emphasize a transition from office-based blood pressure assessment to self-measured blood pressure (SMBP) readings obtained outside the medical office to improve diagnostic accuracy, therapeutic efficacy, and patient engagement. However, a FHIR profile specific to the capture and exchange of SMBP and associated data has not been defined. The lack of standards-based data exchange among systems, lexical inconsistencies, and variability of communication mechanisms compromises the detection, monitoring, and management of patients with hypertension.
The CardX Hypertension Management project intends to develop an HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide (IG) that will act as a framework for the exchange of SMBP data. The IG will define a FHIR framework that enables efficient and effective communication between home blood pressure measurement devices, patient-facing intermediaries (e.g., apps, personal health records), and clinical EHR systems. The objective is to align and harmonize existing work to create a vendor-agnostic set of hypertension standards that enable interoperable, scalable, and accessible hypertension management. A framework that emphasizes capturing data once and reusing it for multiple purposes should increase the proportion of patients treated to goal, improve clinical outcomes, reduce clinician burden, and enable more complete and accurate reporting.
For more information, visit:
- CardX Hypertension Confluence Page
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https://confluence.hl7.org/display/COD/CardX+-+Hypertension+Management
- CodeX Public Confluence Page
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https://confluence.hl7.org/display/COD/CodeX+Home