CGH Faculty, Dr. Lily Yan, receives WCM’s "Fund for the Future" Grant

In April 2023, Weill Cornell Medical College awarded the Fund for the Future grant to Dr. Lily Yan, Assistant Professor of Medicine. This prestigious award recognizes the outstanding work of accomplished instructors and promising young investigators. The award provides up to $300,000 in funding during the crucial period of career development that spans the completion of research training.

Dr. Yan's area of expertise is in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in low-income countries. Her proposed project aims to address the high prevalence of hypertension in Haiti. Through her work on the NIH-funded Haiti CVD Cohort Study (NHLBI R01 143788), a longitudinal study evaluating risk factors and CVD events among about 3,000 participants in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Dr. Yan and her team found that 29% of participants had hypertension, of whom only 13% are controlled. This cohort study is run by the long-term collaboration between GHESKIO and the Center for Global Health (CGH) at Weill Cornell Medicine.

In addition, through her interviews with medical providers and patients on the difficulties in identifying and treating hypertension in Haiti, she identified various environmental and systemic barriers to care, such as inaccessible transportation to healthcare centers and disruptive, changing routine behaviors at home, that create challenges for patients trying to access care. These environmental barriers are difficult to overcome through interventions only provided at a patient’s healthcare center.  

To address these significant barriers to care, Dr. Yan's team proposes an intervention to work with community health workers (CHWs) to identify and treat hypertension in households. In a pilot project, CHWs measured the blood pressure of participants at their homes and referred and supported hypertensive participants in initiating medication with medical providers. After six months, the pilot study showed that 74% of these patients’ hypertension was controlled - a notable preliminary finding.

Dr. Yan's proposed study has three aims:

1) to identify barriers and facilitators for participants and medical providers to implement hypertension prevention and treatment in the community in Haiti,

2) to design the intervention to identify and treat hypertension at the household level, and

3) to assess the acceptability and fidelity of the intervention.

“In the interview with one of the participants, she mentioned that her husband’s treatment experience encouraged her to participate in the program as well, and I heard similar stories,” said Dr. Yan, looking back on the results of qualitative interviews conducted with patients in the study. “This finding made us consider that the environment at home influences a lot of their behavior. Our goal is to identify how we can decentralize the healthcare system with CHWs, who have rich local knowledge and have gained trust from the participants.”

By receiving the Fund for the Future grant, Dr. Yan and her team will have the support they need to carry out this critical research and identify how to improve the treatment of hypertension in Haiti.

Article by Nao Haba