Edinburgh Napier University

  The British Heart Foundation is partnering the Scottish Government in supporting the roll out of an evidence based BP telemonitoring initiative (scale up BP) in order to facilitate increased detection and improved management of hypertension and subsequently reduce associated cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. However it is difficult to directly measure the health and service impact of particular initiatives such as BP telemonitoring with evaluation is often limited to measuring participant numbers and seeking patient and professional opinion. The purpose of this study is to build and test a health records based observatory to track cardiovascular outcomes and service use for patients with conditions such as hypertension or atrial fibrillation and as an exemplar to use it to measure the health and service impact of Scale Up BP. This will be done by identifying relevant patients in the records of collaborating GP surgeries, linking these records to the Scottish hospital admission and prescribing records and developing virtual comparators from anonymised health records for those participating in specific initiatives. Different methods of building and matching the virtual comparator group will be piloted as will the use of a composite cardiovascular event outcome measure.