The goal of this EQIPP course is to help you create plans for improvement and to address gaps in pediatric hypertension care. These activities focus on improving ongoing medical care and patient self-management education and support. You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) cycles.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will:

1. Be familiar with the following:
• The guidelines for pediatric hypertension identification and recommended actions for managing this condition in patients.
• The policies that outline the responsibilities for care coordination between the pediatric medical home, the hypertension care team, and other providers.
2. Recognize how these key activities contribute to high-quality, ongoing hypertension care and implement ideas for change to improve your delivery of care to patients in your practice
• Document the measurement of blood pressure for children over 3 years old in all visits.
• Interpret the blood pressure measurement based on gender, age, and height percentile.
• Confirm the diagnosis of hypertension.
• Evaluate for identifiable causes and co-morbidity associated with hypertension.
• Discuss lifestyle modifications.
• Develop a treatment plan.
3. Measure and improve hypertension care delivery and processes for the above key activities by doing the following:
• Collect and analyze baseline data to establish a starting point for improvement.
• Identify one or more performance gaps in one or more key activities of hypertension care.
• Create an improvement plan for closing identified performance gap(s) by clarifying the improvement idea to be tested:
• AIM: What are we trying to improve or accomplish?
• MEASURES: How will we know that a change made is an improvement?
• CHANGES: What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
• Test your ideas quickly on a small scale so you can determine if the changes lead to improvement.
• Collect and analyze follow-up data to measure the results of your test.
• Determine how to sustain successful changes to systematically integrate them into the culture, processes, and workflow of your practice.
• Create additional improvement plans and repeat PDSA cycles until you reach the maximum potential of providing optimal hypertension care in your practice.