NEW ORLEANS – , according to a University of Florida, Gainesville, analysis of claims data for almost 4 million people.
Dr. Steven M. Smith
“With each iteration, evidence-based guidelines have more strongly recommended out-of-office blood pressure measurement, but it’s basically had no impact. If we are going to continue to recommend this aggressively, we need to put some pressure on both payers and providers,” said lead investigator Steven M. Smith, PharmD, of the department of pharmacotherapy & translational research, associate director of the Center for Integrative Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases at the university.
“A number of studies show that ambulatory blood pressure monitoring [ABPM] is more strongly predictive of outcomes than office pressure.” It’s “considered the gold standard for hypertension,” he said at the joint scientific sessions of the American Heart Association Council on Hypertension, AHA Council on Kidney in Cardiovascular Disease, and American Society of Hypertension
The reason is that ABPM gives a continual reading of blood pressure over 24 hours, not just an office snapshot, and can do things that office measurements cannot, including ruling out white coat hypertension, identifying masked hypertension, and checking nocturnal dipping and morning surge, both of which are related to cardiovascular risk.
Although common in Canada and Europe, it’s no secret that ABPM hasn’t caught on in the United States. The goal of Dr. Smith’s work was to help quantify the situation.
Using Truven Health Analytics commercial insurance claims data, he and his team identified 3,378,645 adults starting their first hypertension medication and 335,200 starting their fourth from 2008 to 2017. They looked for ABPM claims in the previous 6 months as well as the month after patients started their new medication. The idea was to assess ABPM use in both new and resistant hypertensive patients.
ABPM claims were submitted for 0.15% of patients starting their first drug in 2008, rising to 0.3% in 2017. ABPM was used mostly before treatment initiation.
ABPM use actually declined among resistant patients from about 0.27% in 2008 to about 0.12% in 2017. Use was split about evenly before and after they started their fourth medication.
About 80% of claims – generally for interpreting ABPM results, not the upfront cost of the machine – were paid. Claims submitted tended to come from more high-end plans. Reimbursement rates were similar for more bargain plans, but there were many fewer claims submitted, Dr. Smith said.
He thought plans would at least follow Medicare’s reimbursement policy, which, at the time of the study, covered ABPM to rule out white coat hypertension, “but they didn’t seem to,” he said. Medicare recently added coverage for suspected masked hypertension.
The study doesn’t address why uptake is so low in the United States, but outside the world of hypertension specialists, “physicians don’t see a value in it. They don’t recognize what they would get from ABPM and how that would change what they do,” in part because treatment is currently based on office measurements. There’s also probably uncertainty about how to interpret the results, Dr. Smith said.
Standardization across payers about what they’ll cover and for whom would probably help, he added.
Findings in the study were similar for home blood pressure monitoring, but probably not an accurate gauge of use. Patients mostly buy their own devices and report the results to their physician, without getting insurance involved, he said.
There was no industry funding, and the investigators didn’t have any disclosures.
SOURCE: Smith SM et al. Joint Hypertension 2019, Abstract P2067.