Hypertension (HTN) is a highly prevalent chronic condition and strongly associated with morbidity and mortality. HTN is amenable to prevention and control through public and population health programs and policies. Therefore, public and population health programs require accurate, stable estimates of disease prevalence, and estimating HTN prevalence at the community-level is acutely important for timely detection, intervention, and effective evaluation. Current surveillance methods for HTN rely upon community-based surveys, such as the BRFSS. While BRFSS is the standard at the state- and national-level, they are expensive to collect, released once per year, and their confidence intervals are too wide for precise estimates at the local level. More timely, frequently updated, and locally precise prevalence estimates could greatly improve the timeliness and precision of public health interventions. The current study evaluated EHR data from a large, mature HIE as an alternative to community-based surveys for timely, accurate, and precise HTN prevalence estimation.
Objective:
To assess the equivalence of hypertension prevalence estimates between longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data from a community-based health information exchange (HIE) and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).