Northern Virginia’s largest health system is using a cash infusion to invest in staff, technology and at-risk communities impacted by the number one cause of death in the United States: coronary heart disease.
Real estate magnate Dwight Schar and his wife, Martha, are giving $75 million to Inova Health System’s Heart and Vascular Institute, which will be renamed Inova Schar Heart & Vascular, the health system announced Tuesday afternoon.
The gift, two years in the making, surpasses their 2015 donation of $50 million to build a cancer research institute that also bears their name, and is their biggest gift to a single cause.
“As it related to health care, when you make a contribution, the contribution lasts forever,” he said in an interview. “The advancing of additional technology, you give that back to the community and that just keeps going.”
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Schar’s Reston-based company, NVR, is one of the largest home builders by revenue in the country and Schar is a longtime philanthropic supporter of Virginia institutions, including George Mason University. Until recently, he was a partial owner of the Washington Commanders. A founder of the company, he retired a year ago to focus on charitable giving and commercial projects.
Inova CEO J. Stephen Jones called the donation “humbling,” and said it would help the health system recruit and retain physicians, scientists and even lab technicians when competition for medical professionals is intense.
The pandemic caused many burned-out clinicians to leave the field, just as patients who deferred preventive care and testing, such as mammograms and colonoscopies, were seeking medical attention for advanced cancers. The same phenomenon occurred with heart and vascular conditions, Jones noted.
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“For heart and vascular, it’s making sure that people have their tickers tuned up and ready to live long healthy lives and this team is ready to do it,” he said.
Inova will use the Schar money to launch initiatives that Jones said the health system otherwise would not, such as programs for underserved communities at risk for heart disease, including women and Black and Latino patients.
The term heart disease refers to various heart conditions, the most common of which is coronary artery disease, which can lead to heart attack, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Chris O’Connor, president of the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute, said cardiovascular disease remained the number one killer of Virginians even during the pandemic.
Research shows the condition is more prevalent in the African American community due to a complex mix of social barriers to health O’Connor rattled off, including challenges in access to care and increased risk factors, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.
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“It’s still very, very important and common, particularly in middle-aged Americans, and particularly in our underrepresented minority population,” he said.
African Americans were 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease than White people in 2019, and although Black residents are 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure, they are less likely than White people to have the condition under control, federal data show.
The disparity is even greater in Black women, who are nearly 50 percent more likely to have high blood pressure than White women.
The money will primarily be used to reduce and eliminate heart disease through prevention and early detection, O’Connor said. That would look like increasing capacity at outpatient centers, deploying wearable technology and scheduling more telehealth appointments and perhaps developing digital technologies to scan medical records for risk factors, he said. O’Connor said the institution also needs to hire more Black doctors, nurses and technologists.
Schar said his goal it to improve access to cardiac care for residents who have little choice where they seek treatment.
“Wealthy people can go wherever they can get the best treatment,” he said. “The overall population doesn’t really have that choice so by being able to provide the access, the affordability and the quality locally, it’s a gift to the community.”
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