September 25, 2014 – : Blood Pressure Management

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Anchor lead:  One day soon you may be called upon to manage your own blood pressure, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Blood pressure is a tricky thing, going up temporarily in stressful situations like a doctor’s office.  So rather than rely on such a reading, many people measure their own blood pressure at home with an eye toward greater accuracy.  Now a new study puts forward the notion that people can also manage their own blood pressure medications.  Howard Levy, an internal medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Levy:I simply ask my patients to go get a blood pressure monitor, bring it into the office, so we can check and make sure it’s accurate, and then I turn them loose. Check your blood pressure, check it a few different times a day, and one of the cool things we’re able to do with our electronic health record is set up flow sheets that enable patients, at home, to not only record their blood pressure but enter it into this electronic flow sheet.  This way they’re actually participating in writing into their medical record, we do it with blood sugar, nutrition, we have a weight flow sheet.  We can really build it on anything we want to just based on the parameters we ask a patient to monitor at home.   :30

Levy is open to investigating whether medications can also be managed by patients themselves.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.