Diagnosing and managing heart disease can be challenging in any setting, but rural communities face distinct barriers, including long travel distances and limited access to specialty care. For Plicy Perez-Kersey, MD, the inaugural recipient of ACC's Thad and Gerry Waites Rural Cardiovascular Research Fellowship Award, advancing research focused on improving cardiovascular outcomes in underserved rural populations is key to addressing these challenges.

For her one-year fellowship, Perez-Kersey, a pediatric cardiologist and clinical instructor at Seattle Children's Hospital and the University of Washington School of Medicine, is focusing on maternal-fetal care and the social factors affecting both children and adults with congenital heart disease.

"Despite how relatively common congenital heart disease is, there are still significant geographic, racial and socioeconomic disparities," she says. Addressing these disparities, especially when it comes to expectant mothers and infants, is important because timely fetal diagnosis can support safe delivery planning and rapid stabilization of infants with critical congenital heart disease.

Through her work, Perez-Kersey hopes to develop a sustainable approach to reducing disparities in rural congenital cardiovascular care. She is currently analyzing data from the National Inpatient Sample, the largest publicly available all-payer inpatient care database in the U.S., and will work with rural communities in Washington, Mississippi, West Virginia and Georgia throughout the fall.

Longer-term, Perez-Kersey's goal is to establish community-based training for local community health workers and health care providers, as well as develop a program that includes health screening for pregnant women to improve timely detection of cardiovascular conditions during pregnancy and prenatal detection of congenital heart disease. Connecting patients with resources for appropriate care will also be critical.

"There is still restricted access to quality health care," she says. "We have a lot of adults living with congenital heart disease who must travel long distances to receive care. That seems like an unnecessary barrier for people to get the care they need. We hope this project can be one small step in the right direction to reduce the disparities that shape the care people receive."

Based on nearly a decade of previous experience in rural communities in Washington and Alaska, Perez-Kersey says providing care in remote areas forces clinicians to be problem solvers. "You have to really understand the resources your patients have available to them and how that affects the way they are able to follow your recommendations," she says.

She also stresses the importance of rural community health being grounded in trust and partnership with local communities.

"No one likes someone coming in and telling them what to do," Perez-Kersey says. "We want to be really thoughtful about how we approach working in a community that we are not a part of when trying to implement change. We want to be a partner in training local health workers and health care providers to work in that community."

Perez-Kersey plans to share findings from the NIS analysis and the development and implementation of training programs in these rural communities at future ACC meetings and medical conferences.

"The hope is that our findings will help inspire policy change so we can actually bridge the gap between clinical medical research and policy change that makes a difference in people's lives," she says.

Learn more about the Thad and Gerry Waites Rural Cardiovascular Research Fellowship Award and apply for the next fellowship award by Oct. 22.

Clinical Topics: Cardiovascular Care Team, Congenital Heart Disease and Pediatric Cardiology, Congenital Heart Disease, CHD and Pediatrics and Quality Improvement

Keywords: Cardiology Magazine, ACC Publications, CM-Oct-2026, Heart Defects, Congenital, Awards and Prizes, Hospitals, Rural, Rural Health, Health Care Quality, Access, and Evaluation, Fellowships and Scholarships