Hypertension, suffered by more than 120 million U.S. adults, is the leading risk factor for stroke and other cardiovascular diseases, and all individuals face a 70-90% risk of developing it across their lifetime. Current methods for tracking hypertension prevalence are less than optimal. Annual or biennial in-person surveys lag two to three years behind real time, are not sufficiently accessible to traditionally under-resourced communities, and show declining participation rates.
To mitigate these shortfalls, a new collaborative study between Emory University and Pursuant Health has identified a free way to make blood pressure monitoring more readily available and to better inform related public health interventions.
Blood Pressure Measurements from Self-Service Health Kiosks in U.S. Retail Stores, 2017-2024, published Aug. 6, 2025, in JAMA Cardiology, explores an analytic sample of nearly 1.3 million adult users of free, self-service blood pressure monitoring kiosks offered by Pursuant Health in retail locations nationwide.
“As participation in national health surveys continues to decline, especially among underserved groups, alternative data sources like health kiosks are becoming increasingly important for understanding and improving population health,” says Thomas W. Hsiao, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health.
Housed in Walmart and CVS locations in 49 states and the District of Columbia, Pursuant Health’s kiosks can supplement traditional surveys, particularly in under-resourced and rural communities. The kiosks support screening and monitoring interventions and can provide links to health care or social services as needed. They also enable rapid deployment of new survey questions about other key indicators of health.
“Pursuant Health’s self-service kiosks provide more than 2.5 million health screenings to the American public each month, empowering people with valuable health insights they might not otherwise receive,” says Lauren Fede, MPH, senior analyst at Pursuant Health. “Collaborating with leading academic institutions like Emory University allows us to contribute to high-quality research that advances public health while continuing our mission to expand health care access.”
Users of the kiosks, aged 18-99, self-reported their demographic information and hypertension status. Of the 1.3 million users monitored between 2017-24, nearly half self-reported a hypertension diagnosis. Among those who self-reported a hypertension diagnosis, nearly one-third had high blood pressure.
While kiosk results showed greater prevalence of high blood pressure than are reflected by national survey methods, they can significantly augment traditional surveys in measuring and mitigating the burden of one of the nation’s greatest public health challenges, particularly for historically underserved populations.
“Our study is an example of how public health researchers and technology startups can collaborate to identify opportunities for improving population health,” says Jithin Sam Varghese, PhD, assistant professor at the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center and Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. “We aim to expand this collaboration between Pursuant Health, Rollins School of Public Health and the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center, to scale up interventions and evaluate their impact among populations experiencing the highest burden of chronic diseases like obesity, hypertension and diabetes.”