Current Hypertension Reports – Web Alert
Editor: Naomi D.L. Fisher, M.D.

All in a Domain Name: Bloodpressure.com

I overheard an 8-year-old girl desperate to find out who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919. It turns out that a prize from her baseball counselor was at stake. She sat down at the computer and proceeded to type “baberuth.com.” While domain names aren’t always what they seem, her logic was impeccable. And if this worldly child were to guess at the Internet address harboring everything related to blood pressure, she would likely hit upon a goldmine at “bloodpressure.com.” This domain name has belonged to the most extensive dedicated hypertension site since 1996. Bloodpressure.com was acquired by Spacelabs Medical in 2000, and its homepage can also be accessed via www.lifeclinic.com. Founded in 1996 by Dr. Thomas Pickering, director of Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, the site has a mission to provide patients with up-to-date and accurate information about their condition, to help them manage it better and to improve communication between patients and their doctors.

bloodpressure.com http://www.bloodpressure.com or http://www.lifeclinic.com

Winner of the Fall 2000 World wide Web Health Awards Silver Prize and the 2000-2001 Golden Web Award from the International Association of Web Masters and Designer, bloodpressure.com deserves a complete site tour. It comes close to one-stop shopping for blood pressure information on the Internet. Hypertension is the main focus of bloodpressure.com, but the blood pressure tab is now adjoined by links to platforms covering cholesterol, diabetes, stroke and heart failure.

A New this Week banner tops the blood pressure home page, highlighting an important recent publication, together with topical food and fitness tips. The feature article in early July, for example, describes the Third Report of the National Cholesterol Education Program Guidelines for Patients with Hypertension. The featured recipe, summer smoothies, is taken from Heart-Healthy Home Cooking, African American Style, published by the Office of Research on Minority Health. Current fitness tips caution against heat exhaustion and heat stroke when exercising in the summer months, and the healthy eating page defines salt terms for the educated consumer: reduced sodium, low sodium, very-low sodium and sodium-free.

The Health Resources box is patient-friendly, and comprises the following: 1) healthy cookbook with online recipes for beef and chicken, beverages, breads, pastas, soups and salads, 2) exercise guide, 3) medications, covering prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications, and herbal preparations with facts about indications, side effects and drug interactions, 4) health calculators (ideal weight, ideal calories, sleep, body mass index, physical activity calculators), 5) locate a free blood pressure kiosk. With this recent addition, patients enter their zip code or city/state, and then click to see a map of monitor locations, typically in drug stores, where their blood pressure can be measured for free. lifeclinic.com maintains more than 10,000 kiosks across the United States. Lifeclinic was formed in November 1999, as a subsidiary of Spacelabs, a company founded in 1958 to develop specialized vital signs monitoring equipment for the space program. Today, Spacelabs is a major provider of cardiovascular monitoring, diagnostic instrumentation, clinical information systems, and ambulatory blood pressure monitoring systems.

Community: Ask the doctor is a moderated discussion board that posts both questions and answers on BPLINE, a list server open to the public. Patients’ questions, together with answers when provided by bloodpressure.com staff, are e-mailed to other registered BPLINE members.

Ask the Doctor: When questions are answered on the discussion board, both the question and answer are posted for public use.

My Health Record: Patients are empowered to take control of their health through this interactive system. After registering, they can securely maintain health records and record personal medical data, including weight, cholesterol, and blood glucose. Patients can easily edit or add new data and can automatically upload data from Lifescan blood glucose monitoring systems.

Find a Physician allows patients to search by doctor name or locality, and to view a listing of all registered doctors matching their descriptions.

For Physicians: A free registration allows patients to find a particular physician’s practice online. Biographic information includes membership in professional organizations and a place to advertise designations such as an American Society of Hypertension specialist. Office information is also included, so patients can determine, for example, if ambulatory blood pressure measurements are offered. lifeclinic.com also offers free patient pamphlets and patient information guides.

Site Search: Enter a keyword life “labile hypertension,” and in this exhaustive list, you will also find OPERA and HOPE, HCTZ and HDL, pre-eclampsia and yoga. The user is referred to studies and reviews appropriate to the topic.

Diabetes: In addition to blood pressure, lifeclinic.com provides related coverage of diabetes mellitus, cholesterol, stroke and heart failure. Not all of these sites are as well developed as is the blood pressure site, but the diabetes home page offers basic diabetes information and news, and covers complications, treatment, glucose control and lifestyle. Under diabetes tools, patients will find online glucose charting and a guide to diabetes and pregnancy. A diabetic supply guide lists available products for taking care of all aspects of diabetes, from oral medications and insulin, to delivery devices (syringes, insulin pens, external and implantable pumps), monitoring devices, footwear, and skin products. lifeclinic.com users can also automatically upload glucose measurements from their home glucose meter to their secured health record through a personal computer. This application in currently available to patients using One Touch (Lifescan, Milpitas, CA) and Glucometer (Bayer Diagnostics) home glucose monitors.

Nutrition and Fitness: In addition to news and nutrition and weight management goals, a nutrition and fitness tracker calendar includes a diary, cholesterol, weight and exercise entries. This is the same fitness tracker accessed under blood pressure.

By the way, executive Harry Frazee, notorious in Boston for initiating the “Curse of the Bambino,” sold The Babe allegedly to finance his latest theatrical production, “No, No Nanette” which Freeze directed and produced on Broadway, may have been the culprit. With the Red Sox one and a half games behind the Yankees as we head into the All-Star break, the Harvard hypertension community, for one, is still hoping for a miracle.

Source: Current Hypertension Reports