April 2026 - Patients with Personalised Targets/Low BP's

Patients with Personalised Targets

We’ve come across an issue that may have affected patients with a personalised BP target when they’ve submitted a BP on a questionnaire. For most practices, very few, if any, patients appear to have been affected.

Patients with a personalised BP target must have protocols run to assess whether their blood pressure is above or below that target. It’s not an issue with BPs taken in clinic, or home/ambulatory BPs, as our automated protocols run the comparison at the time. There are a couple of issues we’ve identified when making some updates to automation processes:

• The automated running of the protocol wasn’t working properly
• The reports that identified patients who needed this comparison were in the BP folder but not the top folder and so would easily get missed

We’ve fixed the automated running of the protocol and made sure that it sends any relevant messages at the same time. We’ve also added these patients into the “Retrieve and Save” report for Blood Pressure.

For most practices, very few patients are affected because very few patients have personalised targets. Some practices seem to have a lot of patients with personalised targets. As an aside, it may be worth reviewing these (How do I review Blood Pressure Targets? : Welby Innovate) – it looks like some staff do this on lots of patients, just recording the normal target, probably not realising the implications.

We’ve built some reports to find the patients that may have been impacted:

The first report includes ALL patients where their latest BP was either from a questionnaire or submitted in a practice pod, where it doesn’t look like those have been checked against their target. The second report is the one we’d suggest focusing on. This excludes patients who are in the updated “retrieve and save”, have already been reviewed, or have been asked to provide a more recent BP. We’ve also configured a report output “BP - Compare Latest with Personalised Target”. You can use this to display the BP reported by a patient, their personalised target and also see who and when the personalised target was added. Apologies for the issue and please let us know if any patients have been impacted.

Low BPs

In reviewing this issue, we also thought it best to follow up low BPs (<90/60) that have been submitted by patients. Similar to raised readings, these patients will now be asked to submit home readings. If you have the automated messages enabled, they’re now included. For letters, and those practices that don’t have automation enabled, there are two new reports for sending out these messages:

SEND Comms Annex Preset "BP - Request HBPM after Low BP (BP-LHBPM)" - add code XaAwB                    ***NEW***

SEND. Letter Template "BP - Request HBPM after Low BP (BP-LHBPM)" - add code XagRG and XaAwB              ***NEW***

We’ve published the letter and preset to go with these reports.