Adapting an Hypertension Home-Monitoring System to the Patient’s Cardiovascular Risk

Challenges to Decision Support in a Changing World

Volume

Papers from the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

There is evidence in scientific literature that blood pressure reduction in people with more than 140/90 mmHg results in a significant reduction of the patient’s risk for cerebral and cardiovascular accidents. Moreover, it is recognized that partnership and good communication between patients and healthcare providers are essential to improve blood pressure control. This communication is not easy, because the contacts with the institutions are limited to periodical control visits at the hypertension department (every 6-12 months). It is known that lack of compliance with treatment is the main cause of the failure of hypertension control. Moreover, the compliance is not only a patient’s problem, because statistics of drug prescriptions show that general practitioners (GPs) are not enough aware of the importance of such a treatment, in particular for mild hypertension. It has been argued that this behavior is caused by lack of correct perception of the cardiovascular risk. That’s why recent theories highlight the need for health professionals of increasingly performing risk assessment and risk communication; this should be accompanied by the perception of risk control, i.e. the patient must be convinced that he can decrease the risk by modifying his behavior. This work aims at introducing this "risk theory" into a system that is under development since some years, dealing with tele-homecare of hypertensive patients.