Clinical Care Of Blood Pressure: Standard Measures Misleading

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Clinical Care Of Blood Pressure: Standard Measures Misleading Standard performance measures used by health care systems and insurance companies to assess how well physicians are controlling their patients' blood pressure tell an incomplete and potentially misleading story, according to a study by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The study authors tested a more nuanced experimental measure, designed to better reflect the clinical judgments doctors make in caring for patients, against criteria commonly used in standard performance measures. They compared the two methods using medical records from 201 patients diagnosed with hypertension at two VA health care systems in northern California. Under the experimental measure, only 21 percent of the patients were classified as not receiving adequate treatment, versus 36 percent under the conventional measure…..