Practice Facilitation to Scale up a CDS for Hypertension Management

Hypertension (HTN) is the most prevalent modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease among U.S. adults. Despite a long history of established guidelines to support clinical management, only half of U.S. adults diagnosed with HTN have poorly controlled blood pressure (BP) and medication adherence to proven effective treatment remains suboptimal. Clinical decision support (CDS) has the potential to overcome barriers to delivering guideline-recommended care and improve HTN management. Practice facilitation is a well-demonstrated implementation strategy to support process changes and has the potential to facilitate CDS implementation. Our objective is to rigorously evaluate whether practice facilitation provided in concert with a HTN-focused CDS that incorporates medication adherence results is an effective strategy for scaling and implementing CDS. The investigators will update an existing CDS to incorporate alerts and tools to address medication adherence then randomize 40 small independent primary care practices in New York City to receive either practice facilitation in addition to the CDS or the CDS alone. After a twelve-month intervention period, The investigators will examine the differences in blood pressure control achieved by practices in the CDS plus practice facilitation group versus practices that received the CDS alone