• To enhance your understanding of methods used for measuring blood pressure
• To refresh your knowledge of optimal blood pressure measurement technique
• To increase your awareness of recent innovations in blood pressure measurement
Accurate blood pressure measurement is essential to appropriately diagnose and treat hypertension. Blood pressure is usually measured by taking a single automated office blood pressure (AOBP) reading, but there are newer, fully automated devices that calculate the mean of several blood pressure readings.
A quality improvement initiative was conducted in a US ambulatory care setting to determine whether there were differences in the accuracy of blood pressure measurement when measuring mean AOBP versus single AOBP. A population of 126 patients attending a transitional care clinic at an urban hospital were randomly assigned to receive mean AOBP measurement at the beginning of their appointment, at the end of their appointment, or not at all. This randomised prospective evaluation did not find conclusive evidence regarding the use of mean AOBP measurement versus single AOBP measurement. However, using a fully automated device that calculates mean AOBP may be useful in busy clinical settings, allowing nurses to spend more time on other aspects of their role such as patient education and care coordination.
Primary Health Care. doi: 10.7748/phc.2021.e1695
Peer reviewThis article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and has been checked for plagiarism using automated software
Correspondence Conflict of interestThis project did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors
Buettner T, Bertram A, Floyd O et al (2021) Comparing mean and single automated office blood pressure measurement in a US ambulatory care setting. Primary Health Care. doi: 10.7748/phc.2021.e1695
Published online: 08 September 2021
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