The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) provided funding to the HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research to study how EHR-based Clinical Decision Support (CDS) can provide better care of elevated Blood Pressure (BP) and hypertension in adolescents.
Despite heightened awareness of hypertension in the pediatric population, most adolescents with elevated BP remain clinically unrecognized. Factors that contribute to this gap in care include the need to translate adolescent blood pressure measuring into BP percentiles on the basis of age, gender, height, and dealing with competing demands during clinical encounters.
The study is integrating EHR-extracted data with sophisticated web-based CDS algorithms to provide patient specific point-of-care clinical recommendations, implementing intuitive visual interfaces to communicate CDS to primary care physicians, and will provide both clinical and cost outcome data. The study is working with 18 clinics with 130 pediatric care providers that are treating and estimated 17,000 adolescent patients using the technology.
It is believed that regardless of the outcome, the technology developed and tested will provide many useful insights to advance the science of EHR-based CDS and help translate the massive public and private investments in EHR technology into improved adolescent health outcomes.
Email the investigator Elyse Olshen-Kharbanda at elyse.o.kharbanda@healthpartners.com or go to www.healthpartners.com/institute for more information on the study titled “EHR-based Clinical Decision Support to Improve Blood Pressure Management in Adolescents”.