Clinical Decision Support Tool for Elevated Pediatric Blood Pressures

Under-diagnosis of pediatric hypertension remains pervasive due to difficulty recognizing elevated systolic blood pressures (SBPs). We performed a retrospective review comparing recognition of and response to elevated SBPs ≥95th percentile before and after development of a clinical decision support tool (CDST) in an academic pediatric system. Of 44,351 encounters, 477 had elevated SBPs with documented recognition of an elevated SBP in 17.9% of encounters pre-CDST that increased to 33.7% post-CDST ( P = .001). Post-CDST, 75.5% of elevated SBPs had repeat measurement, with 90.8% of initially elevated SBPs normalizing to