Lidia Virgil Chief Operations Officer
Lidia Virgil is an accomplished Dominican doctor and businesswoman. She is the Chief Operating Officer of SOMOS Community Care.
She is the daughter of Fresa Indiana Villalona and Rafael Felipe Castro, both from Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic. Her father was an active and founding member of the revolutionary movement “14 de Junio” who received political asylum in the United States with his life in danger. Lidia is strong and dedicated to her beliefs, a trait she inevitably inherited from her father.
Lidia graduated from John F. Kennedy High School, after which she returned to her native Dominican Republic to study Medicine at the first University of America, Santo Tomas de Aquino, now the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo. There she received her degree as a Doctor of Medicine. At the university, she also studied business administration at the behest of her father with the intention of transforming health delivery to the people that need it most and helping medical professionals achieve better outcomes.
In 1992 when healthcare was changing in the U.S., she studied medical economics, coding, and auditing to ensure that medical provider coding and documentation at the practices she worked with was up to par and services were performed appropriately, thus becoming a certified coder and auditor.
Lidia Virgil has worked to increase the value of healthcare practices and transform the delivery of care within these practices throughout several areas of the U.S. She transformed a primary care family practice in South Florida into a full urgent care center with a complete radiology department and a pharmacy where patients could walk in with a problem and walk out fully diagnosed and treated without ever needing to go to a hospital or waiting until morning to receive care. In Brooklyn, she built another urgent care center. She also developed a Care Transitions program that has helped thousands avoid hospital re-admissions, a program which she later reproduced throughout New York City with a base in Manhattan. In 2011, Lidia Virgil wrote and implemented a grant from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid called ‘Independence at Home,’ which allowed better care for homebound patients while saving millions of dollars for the Federal Government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Lidia Virgil was one of the original five who avidly worked in the creation of SOMOS Community Care. She worked tirelessly with her four other colleagues and their leader, Dr. Ramon Tallaj, to develop New York State’s only Physician-led Performing Provider System. She used her excellent clinical understanding to create a project implementation plan that successfully transformed the care of the most vulnerable and displaced New Yorkers.
With SOMOS, and in line with her heartfelt beliefs and dedication, Lidia has worked at the forefront in underserved communities. In contrast to others, home observing quarantine throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked tirelessly to design processes to implement screenings and testing in several settings throughout New York City. These projects include testing at local churches, schools, and community centers. She also worked with the New York Stock Exchange to help keep it open and running.
Currently, Lidia leads the operations of SOMOS’s school-based COVID-19 testing program that allows New York City public and private schools to remain open and safe amidst the pandemic. She also avidly runs pop-up vaccination sites throughout New York to ensure that the most vulnerable persons in our community have access to and receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
But everything is not just work for Ms. Virgil. She also volunteers hours teaching and serving others. Lidia works at community events, food pantries, and with a non-profit foundation (FAFE) that supports children and the elderly in her native Dominican Republic. Lidia goes twice a year on medical mission trips to the Dominican Republic (one with the Dominican Medical Dental Society and one with FAFE), where not only do they deliver medical and dental care to a most vulnerable and needy community, but also give every patient the medications that they need for care at absolutely no cost.
Lidia continues to work in a healthcare system that provides better care to vulnerable populations and is working on implementing a value-based payment program by applying quality processes across hundreds of practices in New York City. Her goal is to be a part of a community where the poorest patients receive top-level care, and the physicians are not overburdened but are highly compensated for better outcomes; providing a higher quality of life for both.
