Interview Highlights: Providing Cardiac Care for Pregnant Women During COVID-19 With Jennifer Haythe

By: Hannah Lin (CC '23)

Cover illustration: Vanessa Vasquez (SEAS '23)

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Jennifer Haythe, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Center for Advanced Cardiac Care at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Medical Center and the Division of Cardiology. 
​Follow Dr. Haythe on Twitter @DrJennHaythe!

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The following is a heavily condensed version of the full interview. If you're interested, read more here.


Could you talk about the COVID-19 research that you’re involved in?
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I was involved with a group of cardiologists at the hospital led by Dr. Sahil Parikh which published an article in JACC about the cardiac manifestations of COVID early on. 

We are also awaiting acceptance on a paper about women and COVID, looking at what some of the socioeconomic impacts are for women getting COVID and the types of jobs they do, whether they really get COVID less or are just not getting diagnosed as much because they are less likely to come to the hospital. 

​Finally, I do cardiac obstetrics, which is the care of pregnant women with heart disease, and the obstetrics group published a paper with guidelines on how to do telemedicine visits with pregnant women with different medical problems. I participated in the section on cardiac problems during pregnancy, how to manage during COVID, and what the recommendations would be for how to integrate televisits with in-person visits.


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How are you seeing pregnant women being uniquely affected by this pandemic?

I think women have had a hard time in the labor and delivery world, especially initially, because the hospitals put restrictions on visitors, and I think there was about one week there when women who were pregnant were not allowed to have any visitors with them during delivery, which was incredibly difficult and emotionally taxing on these women. That actually ended up getting reversed, and they were allowed to have one visitor with them during the delivery. I think it’s been very stressful for pregnant women, since they’re having this beautiful thing happen to them, and they’re wearing a mask, their partner’s wearing a mask, everyone in the room is wearing masks and gowns, and it’s not exactly the warm and fuzzy delivery that people may have imagined for themselves. 

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You dedicated yourself to patients on the frontlines along with other healthcare providers during the peak of the pandemic in New York City. Could you talk about how you felt then and how you feel now, a few months after?

I think at the beginning, it was really very stressful. I have two children who are 12 and 15. We’re lucky enough that we have a family country house upstate, so my husband took them there, but then that meant that we were apart for chunks of time, which was hard. 

The beginning was really hard. I think it took a big emotional toll on many of us and I think there was a huge amount of fear because we hadn’t dealt with it before. What we were seeing was really at the level of chaos and war. It felt like a situation that no one had ever seen. 

I was actually incredibly overwhelmed in a positive way by my colleagues and how hard everybody worked, how devoted everyone was, how much they looked out for one 

another, took care of each other, making sure that they were okay, they were safe. I felt the hospital handled it incredibly well from an organizational perspective, being very transparent, providing a lot of information. ​

I think for me personally, it was pretty hard in the beginning, having to travel to see my family, the unknown, the anxiety. I did feel like I had a lot of insomnia. It’s funny you asked because just, I would say, the last week or two, I’ve been starting to feel much more back to myself. I’m not wearing scrubs anymore, I’m wearing normal clothes, and I don’t have to wear Crocs! That’s been a lot better. 

But it was a good three months that were very challenging. We saw some of our colleagues become very sick and thought some of them would die, we know some people who died, and I think that was emotional for everybody.


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Lastly, what gives you hope for the future of cardiology, medicine, and society as shaped by everything that has happened this year (the pandemic, the fight for anti-racism)?

From a medicine perspective, I feel very hopeful because I think in the next 10-20 years we’re going to see a huge change in how cancer’s treated, how heart disease is treated, how for so many illnesses, even neurologic diseases, genetic therapies and targeted therapies are going to make a huge difference for the treatment of people and hopefully become less and less invasive. 

From a societal perspective, I feel like despite how stressful and chaotic everything in the world is right now and sometimes people feel 

hopeless, I’ve seen so much goodness in people during this outbreak in the hospital, whether it’s nurses, doctors, travel nurses from the South who came up to work with the sickest of the sick COVID patients with a smile on their face and FaceTimed the families. ​​

I just always remind myself that there are so many people that are inherently good and that we’re bombarded with all this social media showing how terrible people can be. If you try to push through all that and focus on what you see around you, you’ll see that so many people deep down are incredibly kind, brave, and inspiring. 

The third, in terms of social justice, I think that in medicine, this has become an incredibly important thing to focus on, not only in providing equitable healthcare to all different kinds of minorities, which is a big focus for me in terms of cardiac obstetrics, knowing that the maternal mortality rate in this country is incredibly high, particularly among Black women, but across all areas of medicine. I think, at Columbia, they are making every effort, as they should, to make all minorities feel like they have no barriers, that they are not being discriminated against, that we are all equal and the same, and are taking note of past decisions that were not acceptable and trying to make changes as a result of that.