New York City’s Heart of Innovation series heads to 2023 Scientific Sessions in Philadelphia

This weekend, the City of Brotherly Love is hosting the American Heart Association’s annual conference, Scientific Sessions. The American Heart Association in New York City is celebrating this global scientific gathering taking place just down the road by filming a special installment of The Heart Innovation, a video series created by the American Heart Association ‘s Heart of New York City campaign and sponsored by Simone Development Companies and produced by Red Summit Productions. This four-part video series aims to raise awareness about the life-saving research funded and promoted by the American Heart Association.

For this installment, we followed our Heart of New York City Centennial Chair Joe Simone around Scientific Sessions as he met with leaders from the Association’s national and regional teams, and spoke with New York -based researchers presenting their work at this year’s conference.

One of the researchers who we spoke with is Katherine E. DiPalo, Pharm.D. from Montefiore Medical Center,  Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Her research describes the benefits of pharmacist driven inpatient to teleclinic transition (PICTOC) and the importance of connecting patients to a broad healthcare team. In Dr. DiPalo’s research clinical pharmacist provided hospital-based transitional services two half days per week. Patients who received the pharmacist driven transitional services  had higher rates of 14-day follow up with primary care and cardiology. Dr. DiPalo spoke about her commitment to improving health outcomes in the Bronx, a borough that continues to rank last among all counties in New York State.

We also had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Terrence Henry, from NYC Health + Hospital Harlem, who presented his research about high risk of heart failure in patients with Sickle cell disease. Sickle cell disease is a known risk factor for the development of cardiovascular disease. In his research, Dr. Henry conducted an analysis to evaluate the effect of sickle cell disease on the risk of developing congestive heart failure in a cohort of 287,012 America individuals enrolled in the National Institute of Health’s All of US database.

Sickle cell is estimated to affect 90,000 to 100,000 people in the United States, with a disproportionate impact for Blacks and Latino Americans. The disease occurs in about 1 of every 500 Black or African American births and among about 1 out of every 36,000 Hispanic American births. According to Dr. Henry, we need more research to better understand the connecting between sickle cell disease and heart failure.

Additionally, we met Emily K. Romero a Data Analyst from ICAP at Columbia University, who was presenting her research about the Role Linguistic Acculturation and Physical Activity With Risk of 1 Year Hospital Readmission After Suspected Acute Coronary Syndrome. In New York City. In NYC, more than 3.86 million residents speak a language other than English at home. Spanish (1.9 million), Chinese (463,000) and Russian (196,000) were the most prominent language other than English.  Experts say language and other structural barriers of health may make it more difficult to get the support they will need. Emily is motivated to increase language access for her Dominican and Puerto Rican family and community in Washington Heights, Manhattan.

This year Scientific Sessions will focus on the advancement of cardiovascular science and offer over 1,000 abstracts for over 15,000 attendees.

Scientific Sessions is taking place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from Saturday, Nov 11 – Monday, Nov 13th.