Piloting a novel, scalable, eHealth technology for the control and management of elevated Blood Pressure in Rwanda (HeartCare@Home Project)

The main objective of this pilot project is to strengthen the College of Medicine and Health Sciences (CMHS) at University of Rwanda (UR) to conduct research on a pilot project testing an innovative eHealth technology (HeartCare@Home system) to support the control and management of hypertension in outpatient noncommunicable disease (NCDs) clinics in Rwanda. This scalable new way of healthcare delivery will substantially improve the healthcare system in Rwanda.

The proposed eHealth technology is composed by an innovative mobile health (mHealth) application with rapid-SMS (short message service) technology, an integrated dashboard for signal reception, and a clinical decision support algorithm to enable real-time patient monitoring and management (blood pressure measures, medication adherence, medication efficacy and other parameters).

This project brings together renowned academic researchers, medical doctors, and industry stakeholders to design an innovative technology providing seamless access to patient healthcare information, enabling a change in healthcare delivery for hypertension in Rwanda. The HeartCare@Home project will address an important gap of low-rate blood pressure (BP) control in hypertensive patients in Rwanda resulting in late consultations and an increased cardiovascular mortality.

The HeartCare@Home System is a scalable solution for other cardiovascular diseases such as arrhythmias (integrating home/portable electrocardiograms devices and for non-communicable diseases (integrating other wearable devices) but also for other diseases.