An Award-Winning Educational Tool for Diagnosing Hypertension

Ekamol Tantisattamo, MD, MPH, collaborated with Master of Software Engineering students at UC Irvine to develop an award-winning tool offering guidance on diagnosing hypertension.

Secondary hypertension — high blood pressure caused by an underlying medical condition or medication — can develop in younger adults. Though uncommon, such early-onset hypertension often goes underrecognized, leading to underdiagnosis of the underlying treatable causes, delay in appropriate therapies, and subsequently long-term medical complications.

“Such complications can include coronary artery disease, heart failure, stroke and chronic kidney disease,” says Ekamol Tantisattamo, MD, MPH, director of the Comprehensive Hypertension Center at UCI Health – Orange. “I care for patients with difficult-to-control hypertension or resistant or refractory hypertension, so my patients have various underlying causes of secondary hypertension, ranging from rare genetic diseases to common medication side effects.”

Yet medical trainees or physicians who don’t regularly treat such patients may not be familiar with these conditions, making it challenging to recognize, quickly diagnose, and treat the underlying causes of secondary hypertension.

“As a physician, educator and researcher, I love teaching and providing medical knowledge and information to my trainees, colleagues and patients,” says Tantisattamo, also an associate professor for the Division of Nephrology, Hypertension & Kidney Transplantation in the UC Irvine School of Medicine. However, he wanted to simplify these complex medical conditions in a learning tool that medical trainees and clinicians could access anywhere, anytime.

So, he teamed up with three students from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) for their capstone project in the Master of Software Engineering (MSWE) program. Working with Tantisattamo, Xin Tang, Yichen Yang, and Haitong Yan created a learning tool for secondary hypertension.

The resulting HTN Diagnostic Trainer won the “2025 Role of the Kidney in Cardiovascular Disease” Educational Tools Contest, sponsored by the American Heart Association’s Scientific & Clinical Education Lifelong Learning (SCILL) Committee of the Council on the Kidney in Cardiovascular Disease. The team was awarded $2,000 for the tool, which lets users quickly search and review key clinical concepts of common underlying causes of secondary hypertension by entering clinical questions on a laptop or smartphone. A short video outlines how to use the application.

“Collaborating with computer science students helped me effectively and efficiently deliver complex medical knowledge to students, trainees and colleagues,” says Tantisattamo, who hopes it will help deliver optimal care to patients. He also hopes to continue collaborating with MSWE students to extend and enhance the tool.

“The students were excellent, innovative and passionate about applying their expertise in software engineering to this educational tool,” he says. “I’d be very happy to work with future MSWE students on further improving the tool and on subsequent projects.”

Access the HTN Diagnostic Trainer online. To learn how to partner with students, visit ICS Capstone Projects. To learn about Summer 2026 MSWE project opportunities, view the call and submit the scoping form by May 6.

— Shani Murray