Telemedicine allows the remote exchange of medical data between patients and healthcare professionals. It is used to increase patients’ access to care and provide adequate healthcare services at a distance. Hypertension is a good target for telemedicine, and in particular, for telemonitoring, as it is the most common and important risk factor for CV disease worldwide.
However, while telemedicine has been shown to improve blood pressure (BP) control as compared to standard care, its place in daily clinical practice is not yet clear. Whilst most guidelines refer to it in the context of excluding white coat or masked hypertension, there are no current specific recommendations on the place of telemedicine in general hypertension management, with the partial exception of the 2017 American College of Cardiology (ACC) / American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines which suggest that telehealth strategies can be useful adjuncts to interventions shown to reduce BP for adults with hypertension.
The indications include screening for suspected hypertension, managing older adults, medically underserved people, high-risk hypertensive patients, patients with multiple diseases, and those isolated due to pandemics or national emergencies. This pool of experts is confident that in the future, telemedicine will be more and more embedded in standard delivery care models of hypertension with great benefits for patients and their doctors. Eventually, the current COVID-19 crisis will boost this process.
Ref: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.120.15873
