About

Mariell Jessup, MD, is an Emeritus Professor and Chair of Medicine in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her educational background includes a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania, obtained in 1972, and an MD from Hahnemann Medical College in 1976. Her clinical and research expertise focuses on heart failure and heart transplantation. Dr. Jessup has made significant contributions to the understanding and treatment of heart failure, including the syndrome's ambulatory diagnosis and treatment, as well as the use of support devices for end-stage heart failure. Her work encompasses clinical research, as evidenced by her numerous publications in reputable medical journals, and she has been involved in advancing the field through her leadership roles and scholarly activities.

Research topics

• Gerontology
• Family medicine
• Medicine
• Pathology

Selected publications

• Obesity Pharmacotherapy

  JACC Advances · 2026-04-01

  articleOpen access

  The Duke Clinical Research Institute hosted a think tank, "Anti-Obesity Pharmacotherapy: Need for Guidance, Access, and Equity" in October 2024. This brought together multi-industry stakeholders to align and advance the field of obesity medications (OMs). Key themes included the need for an evidence-based, patient-centric definition of obesity incorporating alternative measures of excess or dysfunctional adiposity, obesity symptoms, and obesity-related complications; barriers to OM access (cost and availability) that perpetuate inequalities in care; ambiguity in optimal clinical OM use; challenges of novel clinical trial designs; and ethics of placebo-controlled trials. Action items included a cross-stakeholder obesity research roadmap, standardized obesity measures inclusive of and beyond body mass index, strategies to ensure equitable OM access, and a forum to address regulatory and payer challenges. The complex, rapidly developing field of obesity research and OM development requires a strategy to ensure equitable, streamlined research and access to OMs.

  PublisherDOI

• Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure: Twenty Years in Review, Lessons Learned, and the Road Ahead

  Circulation Heart Failure · 2025-05-12 · 11 citations

  reviewOpen access

  The Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure program was developed in 2005 with the goal of bringing evidence-based guidelines in heart failure management into widespread clinical practice. The program includes workshops, webinars, tool kits, chart abstraction, performance benchmarking, and achievement awards to drive quality improvement at participating hospitals. Two decades after its inception, the program has grown to include over 600 participating institutions across the United States. Linking registry data to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services claims has also allowed for the evaluation of longitudinal outcomes. Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure has helped improve the quality of care for patients and has contributed substantially to the understanding of clinical science and optimal management of heart failure. This narrative review provides an overview of the indelible impact of the Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure program on quality heart failure care over the past 20 years and highlights future challenges and directions.

  PublisherDOI

• COLLECTION OF SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH IN HEART FAILURE CLINICAL TRIALS: AN INITIATIVE OF THE HEART FAILURE COLLABORATORY

  Journal of the American College of Cardiology · 2025-03-29

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Introducing the OUTPACE Framework for Health Care Quality Improvement

  Circulation Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes · 2025-10-21

  articleOpen access

  Equitable, timely, and evidence-based care remains a central goal across health care ecosystems, yet significant quality gaps, care variability, and health disparities persist. Professional societies, including the American Heart Association, have long developed clinical practice guidelines to provide standardized, evidence-based recommendations across the cardiovascular care continuum. These guidelines are operationalized into quality measures to monitor care, identify gaps, and guide improvement. Professional societies, agencies, and health systems have applied implementation science strategies, such as education, data sharing, and evaluation, to improve care quality and achieve quality measures defined in the clinical practice guidelines. American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines programs target inpatient quality measures for stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, resuscitation, and coronary artery disease, complemented by ambulatory quality improvement programs to support seamless care transitions. Decades of Get With The Guidelines implementation have enabled American Heart Association teams and volunteers to refine these programs, improving guideline adherence at local, regional, and national levels. Lessons learned informed the development of the Observe, Uncover, Trial, Personalize, Accelerate, Check, Expand Framework, designed to guide successful quality improvement initiatives. While existing quality improvement frameworks provide structured approaches, many are costly, slow, or siloed, limiting rapid-cycle, data-driven innovation across diverse health systems. The Observe, Uncover, Trial, Personalize, Accelerate, Check, Expand framework addresses these limitations as an adaptable model, applicable across care settings, disease areas, patient populations, system size, budgets, and target end points. Here, we illustrate the Observe, Uncover, Trial, Personalize, Accelerate, Check, Expand framework through 2 recent American Heart Association programs: Target: Aortic Stenosis and the IMPLEMENT-HF initiative, demonstrating its utility in guiding effective, scalable quality improvement.

  PublisherDOI

• Contemporary Practice Patterns of Vasoactive Use in Cardiogenic Shock in the American Heart Association Cardiogenic Shock Registry

  Journal of the American Heart Association · 2025-10-28 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Vasoactives are the predominant first line of therapy for management of cardiogenic shock (CS). Contemporary practice patterns regarding vasoactive agent selection in CS have not been well characterized. METHODS: The American Heart Association (AHA) CS Registry captures consecutive CS admissions across participating hospitals in the United States. Admissions treated with vasoactive agents within 6 hours of CS onset were included. Agents were categorized as inopressors (norepinephrine, epinephrine, dopamine), inodilators (dobutamine, milrinone), and pure vasopressors (vasopressin, phenylephrine). RESULTS: From 2022 to 2024, among 6847 CS admissions across 84 sites, 3387 (49.5%) were treated with a single vasoactive agent and 3460 (50.5%) were treated with ≥2 agents. Inopressors were used most commonly (73.7% of CS cases), with inodilators and pure vasopressors used in 48.3% and 27.5% of cases respectively. Norepinephrine was used most frequently (64.7%), followed by dobutamine (31.6%) and epinephrine (28.9%). Pure vasopressor use consisted primarily of vasopressin (83.5% of use). Use patterns differed by CS etiology with greater inopressor use in acute myocardial infarction-CS and greater inodilator use in acute-on-chronic heart failure-CS. Use of inopressors and pure vasopressors was greater and inodilator use lower in those with cardiac arrest, supported by mechanical circulatory support, or at higher Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions shock stage. CONCLUSIONS: In a broad population with CS in contemporary practice, inopressors are the most commonly used vasoactive category, with norepinephrine being the most frequently used agent. Several factors including CS etiology and severity are associated with differential practice patterns for vasoactive selection. These data depict the contemporary landscape and may help inform future evidence generation around optimal vasoactive selection for patients with CS.

  PublisherDOI

• Multiregional Implementation Initiative’s Impact on Guideline-Based Performance Measures for Patients Hospitalized With Heart Failure: IMPLEMENT-HF

  Circulation Heart Failure · 2025-03-21 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Despite randomized data for survival benefit (with class 1 recommendations) for treating heart failure (HF) with reduced ejection fraction using quadruple medical therapy (QMT)-defined as evidence-based β-blockers, sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitor, preferably angiotensin receptor/neprilysin inhibitor, and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist-it is underutilized. IMPLEMENT-HF is a multiregional HF quality improvement initiative to improve care and outcomes for patients with HF by enhancing the use of QMT in routine practice. METHODS: This analysis of HF with reduced ejection fraction treatment in patients from hospitals participating in the American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines-HF who volunteered to participate in IMPLEMENT-HF in 7 US regions. IMPLEMENT-HF included multidisciplinary learning to share strategies for formulary changes, electronic health record tools, and patient resources with site-level feedback reports. Participants gathered QMT data at discharge and 30 days after discharge. We evaluated QMT utilization and variation, in addition to other prespecified performance measures, from Q1 2021 to Q2 2023. RESULTS: <0.0001). There was also substantially improved incorporation of health-related social needs assessments. The magnitude of improvements was similar when stratified by sex or race and ethnicity, yet there was significant regional variation. CONCLUSIONS: Among healthcare systems participating in IMPLEMENT-HF, there was a marked increase in QMT use among eligible patients over the course of the initiative. This quality improvement initiative supports a learning collaborative model to promote improvements in QMT use.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rationale and Design of the HeartShare/AMP-HF Deep Phenotyping Study to Improve Understanding of Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction

  JACC Heart Failure · 2025-12-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Drivers of Health in Heart Failure Trials

  JACC Heart Failure · 2025-07-17

  article
  PublisherDOI

• ADDRESSING HISPANIC UNDERREPRESENTATION IN TWO MAJOR HEART FAILURE CLINICAL TRIALS: INSIGHTS FROM THE HEART FAILURE COLLABORATORY (HFC)

  Journal of the American College of Cardiology · 2025-03-29

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• BARRIERS TO ENROLLMENT OF WOMEN IN HEART FAILURE CLINICAL TRIALS: INSIGHTS FROM THE HEART FAILURE COLLABORATORY

  Journal of the American College of Cardiology · 2025-03-29

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Thomas P. Cappola

  University of Pennsylvania Health System

  150 shared

• Barry Greenberg

  UC San Diego Health System

  110 shared

• Roger J. Hajjar

  Mass General Brigham

  101 shared

• Donna Mancini

  Mount Sinai Hospital

  100 shared

• Krisztina M. Zsebo

  100 shared

• Alex Yaroshinsky

  Vital Research

  99 shared

• Lee R. Goldberg

  Saint Luke's Hospital

  94 shared

• Brian E. Jaski

  University of Utah

  88 shared

Education

• Fellow in Cardiovascular Disease, Medicine

  University of Pennsylvania

  1982

• Resident in Internal Medicine, Medicine

  Hahnemann University Hospital

  1979

• MD, Medicine

  Hahnemann University Hospital

  1976

• BA, School of Arts and Sciences

  University of Pennsylvania

  1972