News

Sindhu Srinivas Named Executive Director of HUP-Cedar Ave

A Public Health Campus Changing the Way Health Care is Delivered in Underserved Communities

January 21, 2025

By:

Hoag Levins

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Sindhu Srinivas, MD, MSCE, on site in Penn’s HUP-Cedar Avenue hospital where she is the new Executive Director. (Photo: Hoag Levins)

Sindhu Srinivas, MD, MSCE, LDI Senior Fellow and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine, has been appointed Executive Director of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s (HUP)-Cedar Avenue public health campus.

The Associate Chief Medical Officer for Quality and Safety at HUP, Srinivas is the former Vice Chair for Quality and Safety in the HUP Obstetrics and Gynecology Department. In her new position, she oversees all HUP-based services at the remote HUP-Cedar Avenue campus.

A Different Kind of Care

Located at 54th and Cedar, HUP-Cedar Avenue was created in 2021 when the former Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic’s Mercy Catholic Medical Center was taken over by the Philadelphia Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC) and Penn Medicine—with PHMC owning the property and Penn Medicine managing hospital operations. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Independence Blue Cross Foundation have also joined with Penn Medicine as coalition partners in the transformation of the site into a different kind of care delivery operation focused more broadly on the needs of West Philadelphia’s underserved communities.

PHMC is a nonprofit public health institute that provides outreach, health promotion, education, research, technical assistance, and direct services related to the social determinants of health and other aspects of community health not often addressed by traditional health care delivery systems.

“HUP Cedar Avenue and the Cedar Public health campus overall serves an incredibly important role in improving the overall health and wellness of the community,” said Srinivas. “I am honored to serve as the Executive Director and to advance the mission of this critical campus in partnership with PHMC, CHOP, and the community.”

Higher Levels of Poverty, Worse Levels of Health

A community with historically high levels of poverty, West Philadelphia is a broad stretch of dense housing with 203,000 residents, of which 76% of individuals identify as non-Hispanic Black or African American. The community has traditionally experienced higher levels of poverty, worse health outcomes, and more barriers to health care access than the general population. This disparity is well-documented in research literature and attributed to a range of factors including systemic racism, socioeconomic disparities, lack of access to quality health care, higher rates of poverty, and environmental challenges.

HUP-Cedar and the overall public health campus is designed to address these issues. It provides primary and behavioral health care, emergency services, acute care services, substance use treatment along with new programs focused a broader strategy of patient-centered care that targets health equity by tackling the underlying social and economic factors that impact patient health.

Maternal Fetal Medicine Specialist

A maternal fetal medicine specialist, Srinivas and colleague Adi Hirshberg, MD, gained national fame with their innovative Heart Safe Motherhood program that eliminated the blood pressure check disparity between white women and Black women using a text-based post-pregnancy monitoring system. It was an achievement for which they received the 2024 American Heart Association’s Edward S. Cooper Award.

A health services researcher, Srinivas’ research work has focused on health equity, care delivery models, and maternal health. She previously served on both the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Maternal Mortality Review committees. Nationally, she is President-elect of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM). She earned her MD from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and she completed her residency and fellowship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.