Background:
Pregnant diabetic patients are often required to self-
measure their blood pressure in the waiting room before consulta-
tion. Currently used blood pressure devices do not guarantee valid
measurements when used unsupervised. This could lead to misdi-
agnosis and treatment error. The aim of this study was to investigate
current use of blood pressure self-measurement in the waiting room
in order to identify challenges that could influence the resulting data
quality. Also, we wanted to investigate the potential for addressing
these challenges with e-health and telemedicine technology.
Subjects
and Methods:
We observed 81 pregnant diabetics’ ability to correctly
self-measure in the waiting room during a 4-week observational
descriptive study. Specifically, we investigated the level of patient
adherence to six recommendations with which patients are in-
structed to comply in order to obtain a reliable blood pressure
reading.
Results:
We found that the patients did not adhere to given
instructions when performing blood pressure self-measurement in
the waiting room. None of the 81 patients adhered to all six inves-
tigated recommendations, while around a quarter adhered to five out
of six of the recommendations. The majority followed four or fewer of
the recommendations.
Conclusions:
Results indicate that unsuper-
vised self-measurement of blood pressure is not a reliable method.
Thus, there is a need for increased staff presence and patient training
or, alternatively, for introducing improved technology support. This
could include context-aware patient adherence aids and clinical
decision support systems for automatically validating self-measured
data based on e-health and telemedicine technology.