The Quantified Self in the Nephrology Clinic

I am a big believer in home blood pressure monitoring. In fact, I don’t think you can be serious about treating blood pressure without getting readings outside of the clinic. Everyone thinks about white coat hypertension which is surprisingly frequent. But don’t forget masked hypertension which should call to question normal office blood pressures readings. I did a great interview about this for eAJKD.

A few weeks ago I had a patient bring in a pile of home blood pressure readings and in order to make sense of it I did an informal histogram in our EMR:

Home blood pressure nomogram in my EMR. Tufte would be proud. pic.twitter.com/6bw47ihWXl
— Joel Topf (@kidney_boy) July 10, 2013

Clearly this was not ideal blood pressure control and showing the histogram to the patient convinced him to intensify his treatment.

Edgar Lerma then asked for an app-based solution

@ChristosArgyrop @kidney_boy Can you recommend a Free APP that does useful Home BP Tracking/ Plotting? I realize not everyone can do it 🙁
— Edgar V. Lerma (@edgarvlermamd) July 12, 2013

I linked to an old post on PBFluids that highlighted iBP but in the last few weeks patients have shown me two new free options:

BP Companion on iOS and BPwatch on Android. I do not have a full review, but both seemed like well designed apps and the patients really liked them.