I am a clinical and research cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), an Associate Professor of Medicine, Chief of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center’s (UMMC) Section of Connected Cardiovascular Healthcare. I also serve as Director of UMMC’s Anticoagulation Service and Atrial Fibrillation Treatment Program. I am a former cardiovascular epidemiology fellow at the Framingham Heart Study and I served as an Early Stage Investigator on the Transitions, Risk, and Actions in Coronary Events – Center for Outcomes Research Education (TRACECORE) study.
In addition to these experiences working with large cohort studies I worked within the Cardiovascular Research Network to understand relations between cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure – for this work I received the HMO Research Network Early Career Investigator Award. In 2012, I received a UMMS Clinical Scholar (K12) Award to understand mechanisms underlying cardiac remodeling and arrhythmia and received the Joan and Douglas Zipes Award for the most impactful manuscript published in HeartRhythm for my work describing my primary findings.
I presently serve as MPI of an ongoing, prospective study of AF in older adults, SAGE-AF, that focuses on relations between cognition, frailty, and anticoagulation use for AF. I co-developed a smartphone application to detect heart rhythm abnormalities and am a coinvestigator on a successful NIH grant R 15HL 121761 to examine the usability and performance of the application. I also serve as Pl of NSF 1522052, a collaborative grant focused on developing and validating a wearable device/smartphone app dyad for in-home monitoring of acute decompensated heart failure.
In 2017, I received two UMMS Science and Technology Awards to develop new UMMS centers focused on development of mobile, digital, and electronic systems to enhance cardiovascular care: 1) Data Driven Discovery (D3) in Healthcare (with Mathew, Col) and 2) Center for Smart and Connected Society. My specific qualifications to serve as mHealth core Pl (Col) on this application include my clinical and research expertise relevant to mobile and digital health, my history of developing and testing smartphone applications and wearable devices for cardiovascular monitoring, my history of publication in general (over 155 publications) and publications in the area of digital health, as well as my long-standing history of successful collaboration my the Pl and colleagues (Ramachandran), my coinvestigators (Blaha, Mathew), and consultants (Pagoto).
As mHealth Core Pl on this application, I will be involved in all aspects of the proposed study, including design and implementation of the proposed mHealth science, providing clinical and technical perspectives important to our work, contributing to smartphone application development and deployment, monitoring adherence and developing training materials for participants on the use of wearable devices and apps. This work builds logically on my prior work developing and testing software, including the FHS-NExT app for iOS and Android, and hardware solutions for cardiovascular monitoring for clinical and epidemiological investigations.