“Hypertension is such a difficult disease to manage”: federally qualified health center staff- and leadership-perceived readiness to implement a technology-facilitated team-based hypertension model

Despite decades of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of hypertension care delivery in reducing morbidity and mortality, a majority of hypertension cases remain uncontrolled. There is an urgent need to elucidate and address multilevel facilitators and barriers clinical staff face in delivering evidence-based hypertension care, patients face in accessing it, and clinical systems face in sustaining it. Through a rigorous pre-implementation evaluation, we aimed to identify facilitators and barriers bearing the potential to affect the planned implementation of a multilevel technology-facilitated hypertension management trial across six primary care sites in a large federally qualified health center (FQHC) in New York City. During a dedicated pre-implementation period (3–9 months/site, 2021–2022), a capacity assessment was conducted by trained practice facilitators, including (1) online anonymous surveys (n = 124; 70.5 NCT03713515 , date of registration: October 19, 2018.