BEAT - An Agile Design Framework for Telemedicine in Hypertension

Hypertension is a prevalent chronic condition that significantly impacts the cardiovascular system and poses a risk of developing severe cardiovascular diseases. In Italy, the Italian Society of Hypertension (SIIA) plays a pivotal role in awareness campaigns, patient care, and prevention initiatives. The increasing digitalization of healthcare, particularly through telemedicine, offers new scenarios for improving patient monitoring and care delivery, but comprehensive applications for hypertension are still lacking or poorly supported, especially if they have to ensure both synchronous and asynchronous interactions between clinicians and patients to address their needs and for monitoring between visits.This paper presents Blood pressure Easy Access Telemedicine (BEAT), a design framework for a telemedicine web application dedicated to hypertension management. The framework integrates the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to formalize clinical workflows for both synchronous and asynchronous scenarios. It also includes user interface mock-ups to create intuitive user interfaces and a robust database schema to store and manage temporally evolving clinical data. This feature is essential for tracking patient progress and facilitating personalized care in hypertension management. We also adopted the agile methodology principles, and the design process involved clinicians from the Italian Society of Hypertension to provide iterative refinement through their feedback, and to ensure the alignment with real-world requirements. Finally, we presented BEAT to clinicians not directly involved in the development with an encouraging reception and reported their feedback for future developments.