New York, NY (October 15, 2026) —Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have received a $3.3 million, five-year grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, to test an innovative community-based primary care model for high blood pressure in rural Ghana. The approach will bring this care from distant health centers to patients’ homes and villages.
The funds will be shared between Mount Sinai and the Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC) in Ghana. The project will be led by longtime collaborators David Heller, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Global Health and Health System Design, and Medicine (General Internal Medicine), at the Icahn School of Medicine, and Raymond Aborigo, PhD, MPH, Chief Health Research Officer at NHRC, a research center of the Ghana Health Service.
“My Ghanaian colleagues and I believe that primary care for chronic diseases can be brought out of the clinic, to people’s doorsteps, where the care will be less costly and more impactful because it will prevent and control these diseases early,” says Dr. Heller, who also co-leads the Ghana Partnership at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine. “This funding will make it possible to test that model, potentially revolutionizing the way hypertension care is delivered, not only in Ghana, but in communities globally.”
In a pilot study in rural Ghana, the team showed that community-based nurses and community health workers can successfully address high blood pressure with counseling and medication. In the 90-day trial, among 37 people with hypertension, 86 percent achieved normal blood pressure. The research team will now test this approach in 36 communities across Northern Ghana.
Dr. Heller and Dr. Aborigo will lead a team from Mount Sinai, NHRC, York University in Toronto, and New York University to conduct a randomized clinical trial among 504 adults with high blood pressure. The study will test whether providing community-based hypertension care through an existing public primary health care program produces health outcomes that are as good as or better than clinic-based care, which is often far away and hard to access. The trial will start in fall 2027 and run for three years.
“Up until now, community-based care in Ghana has successfully improved prenatal care and addressed infectious diseases like malaria and pneumonia in children. Now we want to expand the model to include high blood pressure, one of the deadliest chronic diseases in the world,” Dr. Aborigo explains. “When a nurse, trusted by the people, goes door to door to check on the babies, she should also check their parents’ blood pressure, and their grandparents’, and be able to refer them for treatment close to home. We need to keep people healthy across the entire lifespan.”
The project will also explore the cost-effectiveness of community-based chronic disease care and actively engage policymakers and the community to ensure the work is culturally sensitive and can inform national policy. A community stakeholder board will advise throughout the study, and the team will share the results widely.
The Arnhold Institute for Global Health’s Ghana Partnership is a multidisciplinary collaboration among more than 60 faculty throughout the Mount Sinai Health System and the Ghana Health Service. It focuses on collaborative research to strengthen the health systems serving some of the hardest-to-reach communities in rural Ghana.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. Its comprehensive system includes seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. Together, the Health System comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses.
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