Texas Heart Institute Cardiology Fellow Matthew W. Segar, MD, and his collaborators were recently awarded Grand Prize in a research competition hosted by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the Association of Black Cardiologists. The six-month data challenge encouraged researchers to use two AHA resources—AHA’s Get With The Guidelines® – Heart Failure Registry and AHA’s Precision Medicine Platform—to investigate the relationships between heart failure and health disparities, social determinants of health, and structural determinants of health.

Dr. Segar and investigators at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas (UT Southwestern), including Ambarish Pandey, MD; Shreya Rao, MD, MPH; and Sandeep Das, MD, MPH, MBA, won the challenge’s top prize for their study “Impact of Social and Structural Determinants of Health on Hospital Length of Stay Among Heart Failure Patients According To Race.” The research team used the AHA registry data to identify key parameters of social determinants of health, at the ZIP code level, that are significantly associated with an extended length of stay following hospitalization for heart failure.  Their findings are currently under consideration for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

 

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