The importance of community-based, remote patient monitoring has increased following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Screening for Hypertension in the INpatient Environment (SHINE) system has been developed to detect those individuals at risk of undiagnosed hypertension whilst they are in hospital (around 14% of patients), with the aim of enabling its management to be undertaken in the patient’s home after discharge from the hospital. “At-risk” patients are automatically identified through interrogation of the electronic patient record (EPR) using a simple algorithm applied to the blood pressure data recorded during the patient’s stay. Following hospital discharge, patients have their blood pressure monitored at home for 24 hours using Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring (ABPM).

Early findings suggest that half those with elevated blood in hospital blood pressure are hypertensive in the community. During the COVID-19 outbreak we re-configured SHINE using our remote monitoring expertise to allow remote community monitoring of heart rhythm and 24-hour blood pressure, removing physical contacts.