Dr. Anubha Agarwal joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology as an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Program in Global Cardiovascular Health in July of 2022. She received her undergraduate degree (BA) at Columbia University, medical degree (MD) at Stanford University School of Medicine with additional training at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She completed internal-medicine global health residency at Duke University School of Medicine where she also obtained a Masters in Global Health Science and fellowship in cardiovascular disease at Northwestern University. In addition to her clinical training, she has completed 3 research fellowships dedicated to global cardiovascular health research in Kenya (Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship), India (NIH Fogarty Global Health Fellowship), and Australia (The George Institute for Global Health). Her academic research focus is global heart failure clinical trials and implementation science.
Dr. Agarwal aims to develop, implement, and scale evidence-based interventions to improve the cardiovascular health of undertreated populations globally, including in low- and middle-income countries and the United States. As a NIH/Fogarty Global Health Fellow from 2017 to 2018 in India, she led a team to study the effect of a quality improvement toolkit among 1,400 participants hospitalized with heart failure in 8 hospitals in Kerala, demonstrating improvement in guideline-directed medical therapy in the intervention group. Despite the improvement in this key outcome, more than half of eligible patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) remained sub-optimally treated. Thus, additional strategies are needed to improve care such as the novel late-stage implementation strategy of a polypill for patients with HFrEF which has the potential to transform HF care through simplified care in India and other settings, including the United States.
Dr. Agarwal’s Pathway to Independence (K99/R00) award (pending, impact score: 12) will provide her the necessary advanced training in implementation science, clinical trial methods, and regulatory science for global pharmacological clinical trials to become an independent investigator and leading future global heart failure clinical trialist with expertise in cardiovascular implementation science. Her clinical expertise is general non-invasive cardiology with a focus on primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Agarwal sees patients with a wide variety of cardiovascular diseases and attends on the inpatient cardiology and cardiology consultative service at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Her key interests are developing, implementing, and evaluating a novel polypill-based implementation strategy for patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction in South Asia, global heart failure implementation science, and clinical trials in low- and middle-income countries.