F4D’s
Public Health + Community Service Award

Dr. Ramon Tallaj

Ramon Tallaj, M.D., is a board-certified internist with over 40 years of experience in the medical field. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from the School of Medicine at Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Urena (UNPHU) in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Tallaj completed a residency at St Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City.

He has served in various governmental positions, including the Undersecretary of Public Health and Social Services in his country, the Dominican Republic. At the request of the Archbishop of New York, John Cardinal O’Connor, Dr. Tallaj moved to the United States to provide medical care to New York’s Hispanic immigrant communities. He also established his first internal medicine practice in Washington Heights in 1997.

In 2015, he founded SOMOS Community Care (“We Are” in Spanish), a culturally competent physician-led network of 2,600 healthcare providers serving over 850,000 Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries in New York City’s immigrant communities. SOMOS was one of 25 Performing Provider Systems (PPS) in New York’s DSRIP program. Dr. Tallaj has pioneered the pay-for-performance model in New York State to improve health outcomes by enhancing preventive and chronic care management. Since 2018, Tallaj and his SOMOS network of doctors have saved New York taxpayers over 336 million dollars by reducing ER and hospital admissions by more than 35%.