Clinical inertia in diagnosis and treatment of hypertension in primary care: Quantification and associated factors

The objective of the present study was to quantify both diagnostic and therapeutic inertia in hypertension and to identify patient-associated variables.Cross-sectional, multicenter study of 35 424 subjects carried out in 428 health centers and/or primary care clinics in the Valencian Community, Spain, in a preventive activity conducted during 2003 and 2004. Diagnostic inertia was identified when a patient without known hypertension had high blood pressure (BP) but was labeled "normal" by the medical staff, and therapeutic inertia when treatment was not modified for a hypertensive patient on the presence of high BP values. Bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses were performed to ide…