Remote blood pressure monitoring improved care (but didn’t save money)

December 12, 2023

Morgan Health, July 2022, LINK

We struggle to control blood pressure control in the US. Almost half of American adults have high blood pressure and over a third with hypertension don’t know they have it. Of those who know they have high blood pressure, under a quarter have their blood pressure under control. As you see, hypertension prevalence is higher and control is worse for Black people. 

Remote monitoring can support and empower patients and improve health care outcomes. This can also allow us to address some patient needs without requiring patients to come to medical facilities, which can save money and save patient time. Better blood pressure control could prevent many thousands of premature heart attacks, strokes, and deaths.  

Research published in November in Annals of Internal Medicine compared results of provider practices which do a high level of remote monitoring (25% of more of those with high blood pressure) with practices that do a low amount of remote monitoring (<2.5% of those with hypertension). There were a total of over 115,000 patients with hypertension, and the 2019-2021 medical claims were analyzed. They found that patients of practices with high frequency of monitoring had

-        3.3% more fills of antihypertensive medication

-        1.3% increase in number of unique medicines prescribed for hypertension

-        9.3% fewer hypertension related acute care encounters

-        $274 increase in total hypertension-related spending

All of these differences are statistically significant. There could be other differences between the high-monitoring and low-monitoring practices that the researchers did not consider. The researchers used de-identified claims data and did not have access to actual blood pressure readings from medical records.  

Implications for employers:

-        Remote monitoring appears to increase the amount of medication that patients receive, and decrease unplanned hypertension-related outpatient visits. 

-        Cost savings from decreased inpatient care through prevented heart attacks and strokes will likely take substantially longer.

-        Employers can improve the medical care of their members by offering remote blood pressure monitoring, but should be cautious about projections of large short-term cost savings. 

Tomorrow: Current data on telemedicine use by specialty

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