Automated Blood Pressure Measurement — Without a Clinician in the Room

Measuring blood pressure (BP) accurately requires time and space — two precious commodities in a busy clinical practice. Automated devices that can measure BP at specified intervals with a patient alone in a quiet location (“unattended” BP measurement) provide accurate measurements while staff tend to other tasks. In this single-center study, researchers in a Boston hypertension clinic used an unattended automated device* to compare delay times (3 vs. 5 minutes for first measurement after clinic staff leave the room) and intervals between three consecutive measurements (30 vs. 60 seconds); all patients had undergone 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring a few days previously.

The longest protocol (5-minute delay, 60-second intervals) and the shor…