Advocate Aurora Research Institute received a $745,000 five-year subaward from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities through a research collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The project, “Reducing ethnic and racial disparities by improving undertreatment, control, and engagement in blood pressure management with health information technology,” or REDUCE-BP, for short, evaluates new approaches to help providers and patients overcome health barriers common to people of color.
“Our organization is engaged in many efforts to eliminate health disparities across the many diverse communities we serve,” said Alvia Siddiqi, MD, Advocate Aurora Health Vice President of Population Health in Illinois, Health Equity Council member and coinvestigator of the study. “Reducing disparities for our patients living with hypertension has become one of our most pressing initiatives.”
Almost half of all adults living in the U.S. are diagnosed with hypertension, and more than 75% of them won’t achieve healthy blood pressure control, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“While uncontrolled hypertension continues to be a significant health issue in our country, its prevalence is even higher among people of color, resulting in substantially greater rates of stroke, cardiovascular conditions and kidney disease in Black, Latino, Hispanic and Asian American populations,” said Marlon Everett, MD, Advocate Aurora Health interventional cardiologist and REDUCE-BP site principal investigator.
Epidemiologist Rasha Khatib, PhD, MHS, study coinvestigator and Research Scientist for the Research Institute, has extensively researched barriers to hypertension control in people of color. Dr. Khatib developed a conceptual framework with practical actions for overcoming these barriers.
Researchers will evaluate the effectiveness of REDUCE-BP e-tools compared with routine care to reduce high blood pressure in adult patients with a history of uncontrolled hypertension cared for at designated Chicagoland Advocate Medical Group clinics. The e-tools will include dashboard tools focused on identifying patients with poorly controlled hypertension by race and ethnicity, linked with information on social determinants. Additional tools at the point of care, designed using behavioral principles, will assist primary care providers with prescribing decisions based on hypertension treatment guidelines as well as providing integrated self-monitoring tools.
REDUCE-BP is a collaboration between investigators from Advocate Aurora, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Dartmouth and the University of California, San Francisco.
This study is supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award number R01MD014874.
To learn more about Advocate Aurora’s research, visit aah.org/research.