Expanding on a legacy of heart health education

When fourth-year Aravind Krishnan, a biology, health care management and policy, and statistics major in the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, saw the Sarah Katz Award advertised last year, he viewed it as an opportunity to continue a legacy of heart-health education left by undergraduate Sarah Katz and to expand her impact from Penn’s campus throughout Philadelphia.

An idea sprung from something he and other members of SHOP, Penn’s Shelter Health Outreach Program, kept hearing from shelter guests: a desire to self-monitor their health and respond to emergencies when a SHOP volunteer or a physician was not present. Krishnan, who is from Newark, Delaware, says that SHOP partners with about 20 shelter and meal-distribution sites across Philadelphia. SHOP volunteers visit each site once or twice a week, providing consistent care and building trust with patients by establishing long-term relationships.

Researchers have found that homeless adults are two to four times more likely to have hypertension than their housed counterparts, while a study led by the University of California, San Francisco, found rates of sudden cardiac death seven times higher than in the general population.

Krishnan and fellow SHOP members came up with the idea of distributing blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, cardiopulmonary resuscitation practice (CPR) mouth barriers to minimize the risk of transmitting infections, and educational materials, and to run CPR and automated external defibrillator (AED) training workshops and equip sites with AED machines. They gave the initiative the name Project HERO, for Hypertension Education and Response Outreach, honoring Katz’s work in cardiovascular health on campus.

“People we work with likely aren’t going to seek out CPR classes and other resources like that,” says SHOP’s clinical director, Aurora Yuan, a fourth-year neuroscience student from Cranbury, New Jersey. “The aim of Project HERO is that we remove that middleman, go on-site and run these training classes, take blood pressures, provide these devices, and provide care through a physician, meeting people where they are.”

Project HERO is the first recipient of the Sarah Katz Award, which provides as much as $5,000 to students who are involved in or interested in pursuing projects designed to improve health literacy, with an emphasis on heart health. Penn students created the award to honor Katz, who was dedicated to heart health literacy until her death in September 2022 in her third year at Penn.

Katz, who grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey and was majoring in health and societies and international relations, was an involved member of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE), one of the six branches of Penn Student Government. She started an initiative to bring CPR and AED training to all of Penn’s College Houses, and as a Red Cap Ambassador with the American Heart Association since 2011, Katz taught CPR to high school students and members of underserved communities.

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The summer after her first year at Penn, she conducted research with mentorship from Victoria L. Vetter, a cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and medical director of Youth Heart Watch, as part of the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program. This included helping introduce a bill to Pennsylvania state legislators for all schools in the state to become certified “heart safe” schools with AEDs, cardiac emergency response plans, trained staff, and sudden cardiac arrest drills. Katz also served as a leader in the John Marshall Pre-Law Honor Society, social chair of the Sigma Kappa sorority, and member of Penn Hillel.

“Penn was her home. She really bloomed at Penn,” says her mother, Jill Katz. “She just loved so many people that she met. She loved her courses. She was so excited about what she was learning.” Her father, Michael Katz, adds, “Sarah was incredibly action-oriented and execution-oriented and wanted to get things done.”

They explained that Sarah had been diagnosed around age 5 with long QT syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder. In the years that followed, Sarah Katz convinced her middle school class to wear red for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women movement, volunteered for the AHA’s Wall Street Run & Heart Walk, got her Bar and Bat Mitzvah class certified, worked with a classmate to create an instructional video about AEDs, and became a certified CPR instructor. Bystanders using AEDs save an estimated 1,700 lives per year in the United States.

“A huge part of Sarah’s legacy is ensuring individuals on Penn’s campus that were previously not equipped to respond to cardiovascular emergencies became trained to do so,” Krishnan says. “Since SHOP has worked with unhoused populations and other marginalized groups across the city for the past several years, our vision with Project HERO is to extend Sarah’s impact and continue her legacy.”

SHOP training director Sophie Gu, a fourth-year bioengineering major from Newton, Massachusetts, explains that SHOP is also partnering with certified members of the community to lead the CPR trainings, such as Penn’s Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) and physicians.

SHOP has held several Project HERO workshops since November. On a recent Tuesday during lunchtime at one shelter, Krishnan sat at a table with Taylor Brothers, project coordinator of The Mobile CPR Project in the Perelman School of Medicine.

Shelter guests could stop by for a brief presentation from Krishnan about hypertension and how to read one’s blood pressure and for a CPR demo from Brothers. Krishnan gave people blood pressure monitors and pedometers to take with them, along with logs to fill out daily blood pressure and steps; those who return their logs would get a gift card. Meanwhile, other SHOP volunteers distributed flyers about the program.

From vision to reality

Fourth-year student Michelle Wen, external chair of SCUE, says Katz “was such a generous person with her time and energy.” Katz was one of the first people she met on campus, and after her death, SCUE wanted to carry forward her legacy of drive and ambition for what she cared about.

After coming up with the idea of an award, they set up meetings with people from the Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships (CURF), the Provost’s Office, and the Office of Student Affairs. The students proceeded with the approval of Katz’ parents, who served on the award selection committee. Wen, an economics and fine arts major from Cliffside Park, New Jersey, says SCUE secured funding from Penn Student Government to sustain the award for at least eight years.

“It was a really inspiring example of students learning how the mechanisms of the University work in order to make this dream a reality, and they did it really quickly,” says Karen Detlefsen, former vice provost for education. People from her office helped the students understand how to fundraise, while CURF advertised the award and helped identify people to review applications.

SCUE has continued heart-health initiatives beyond the new award. Internal chair Maddie Pastore, a fourth-year political science major from Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, says that SCUE partnered with MERT and other campus organizations and offices to offer CPR training across multiple campus buildings last school year on Super Bowl Sunday. She says more than 600 people were trained, an increase from when the campus-wide CPR event was first held the year before.

Krishnan recalled an experience that he had remembered when he first saw the Sarah Katz Award advertised. As an emergency medical technician in high school, he had been on an emergency call for a cardiac arrest, and the man didn’t make it. He says the family told EMTs they didn’t know CPR, and that neither the man nor his family were aware of his hypertension history.

“Simple interventions that are often overlooked can literally help save lives, if only communities are made aware and equipped to take action,” he says.