• Posted August 18, 2025

Automatic Health Stations Easy Way To Check For Heart Health Risks

Everyone’s seen the automatic blood pressure reader wedged unobtrusively into a corner of their local pharmacy.

These sit-down machines can pay huge dividends when it comes to helping people learn their heart health risks, a new study says.

Setting up these health stations at community pharmacies – and one international sporting event – led to nearly 7 in 10 young adults learning they had one or more uncontrolled risk factors for heart disease, researchers reported Aug. 15 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Heart health checks in the community can identify risk factors for future heart disease that can be managed by lifestyle changes or early preventive medications and save lives down the road,” said senior researcher Stephen Nicholls, director of the Victorian Heart Institute at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

“We saw in this study that screening in a variety of places in the community not only works to identify risk but showed that different types of risk were more prevalent depending on screening location, screening day and screening time,” Nicholls said in a news release.

For the study, researchers made heart risk screening devices available at 311 pharmacies across Australia between mid-December 2023 and the end of January 2024. The health stations were available during the pharmacies’ operating hours.

The team also made screening stations available for nine hours a day during an international cricket match that ran between Dec. 26 and 29, 2023. The screenings there were performed in honor of Shane Warne, an Australian cricket icon who died of a heart attack in 2022 at 52.

For the test, people sat down at an open kiosk and slipped one arm into a blood pressure cuff. A touchscreen recorded their age, sex and height, while the device measured their blood pressure, heart rate, weight and BMI. BMI, which stands for body mass index, is an estimate of body fat based on height and weight.

More than 76,000 people took up the offer of free screening during the seven-week study, with 90% screened at pharmacies and 10% at the cricket match. Most participants were 25 to 34 years old.

About 69% of those screened had at least one uncontrolled risk factor — high blood pressure, overweight or obese, or active smoker, researchers report.

Nearly 2 in 5 (37%) had high blood pressure, results show. Of those, about half (48%) hadn’t had their blood pressure checked in a year and nearly 3 in 4 (73%) were not taking blood pressure meds. 

People screened at the cricket match had higher rates of uncontrolled heart risk factors, compared to the pharmacy screenings, researchers found. They had higher rates of elevated blood pressure and high BMI, but lower rates of smoking.

“Pop-up screening can be creatively nested into community-based programs and events that are frequented by specific at-risk populations,” Nicholls said. “These could direct screening efforts towards populations that could stand to benefit the most from (heart disease) risk reduction while concurrently addressing disparities in access to health care.”

The study received funding from SiSU Health, manufacturer of the screening stations.

More information

The American Heart Association has more on blood pressure readings.

SOURCES: American College of Cardiology, news release, Aug. 15, 2025; Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Aug. 15, 2025