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Interview by Jodie Elrod

Watch as Kristie Coleman, MPH, RN, discusses her abstract at HRS 2025.

Please introduce yourself and your focus of work. What were you going to discuss and share today?

Hi, my name is Kristie Coleman. I'm the Director of Electrophysiology Research at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, New York, part of the Northwell Health System. We're here at Heart Rhythm 2025 in San Diego, and I'm going to be talking to you a little bit about my poster that we're presenting today. It's about sex differences and referral for catheter ablation as well as outcomes. This poster is part of an ongoing effort at Northwell Health to aggregate all our atrial fibrillation ablation outcomes in the database that we're calling the ITHACA Database. Today, I'm presenting one of our projects that we've been working on, which is really looking at the different demographics of our population in that database. 

When we first started looking at this database, we were very surprised with the breakdown. We work in a very large health system in New York City, expanding into Connecticut and Long Island. We thought we had a very diverse patient population, and we thought we were doing a very good job, which we are in serving all our patients. When we looked at the data, which goes back from 2015 to about present day, we're tracking outcomes and also tracking who gets referred for ablation. So, we first looked at all the patients with an atrial fibrillation diagnosis at Northwell Health. We looked at who had a cardiology visit, and then we looked at who had an electrophysiology visit. We also tracked the timing between these events. Finally, we looked at who was referred for a catheter ablation or who underwent a catheter ablation. We really wanted to better understand who was being referred and who eventually underwent an ablation. 

So, when we looked at this data, we were very happy to see that we had an overall 13% increase in the referral rates of catheter ablation over time from 2015 through about 2023. However, we noticed that after a certain time point, and this really correlates with the advent of new technological advances, which we're all very excited about with catheter ablation, we've noticed that women who tend to undergo ablation are referred for ablation less than men. So, we really wanted to dive deep into that and understand where in this referral pathway were the transfer of care gaps. We're working with a great team at Northwell Health with our health equity team at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and Dr Stavros Mountantonakis to better understand how we can serve our patients better throughout the whole health system. 

We noticed in our original data that perhaps the transfer of care gap is at the level of cardiology to EP. So, the poster we presented today talks about the descriptive data in general, but we are currently conducting a qualitative study in collaboration with our Katz Women's Health Institute, Feinstein, and Northwell Health, to better understand why. We're asking the question why now, and we're going to do that through qualitative research and really assessing the patients and providers and getting a better hands-on way. There may be some barriers in referral. Then, targeting these barriers with evidence-based interventions. So, that is our overall goal. 

We're very excited to present these results today from our large ablation outcomes ITHACA database from Northwell Health here at Heart Rhythm 2025 in San Diego.

The transcripts have been edited for clarity and length.