Ramon Tallaj, M.D.

Areas of Expertise

  • Internal Medicine
  • Health Administration
  • PCMH Implementation

Ramon Tallaj, M.D.

CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD

Ramon Tallaj, M.D. is a board-certified internist with 41 years of experience in the medical field. He graduated from Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Urena (Unphu), Escuela De Medicina Magna Cum Laude in the Dominican Republic, and completed a residency at St Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City.

He has served in a number of government positions, including as undersecretary of public health and social services. At the request of the Cardinal of the Archdiocese of New York, Tallaj moved to the United States to provide medical care to New York’s Hispanic immigrant communities and 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 2,500 healthcare providers serving over 1 million  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. Tallaj has championed the pay-for-performance model in New York State as a way to improve health outcomes by enhancing preventive and chronic care management.  Since 2018, SOMOS has saved New York taxpayers save over $336 million by reducing ER and hospital admissions by more than 35%.

Since the start of the first wave of the pandemic, Dr. Tallaj, has been active in calling global attention to the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 in communities escalating with illness and mortality rates in New York’s inner cities. 

During its darkest days, Tallaj was responsible for operating over 125 trilingual COVID-19 sites and provided free testing for over 1.5 million people along with free health education, call centers in 5 different languages, when technology and urban and access were nearly impossible. Through his humanitarian efforts, SOMOS was able to serve over 2 million fresh-to-go meals to some of the most poorest and food-insecure neighbors, while still providing free accessible healthcare to immigrant communities during a period of extreme medical crisis. 

Tallaj’s organization proved to be an even a greater community resource in the depths of the COVID-19 crisis becoming the first primary care group in the State of New York to administer millions of COVID-19 vaccines to vulnerable New Yorkers in SOMOS’s medical offices along with launching 100’s of pop sites in local churches, public housing, to landmark mega-sites like Yankee Stadium. 

 

On February 17th, 2022 , Dr. Ramon Tallaj was appointed as the co-chairman of New York City’s, Mayor Eric Adam’s COVID-19 Recovery Roundtable and Health Equity Task Force. He advises on all the comprehensive policies focusing on healthcare access and equity to help rebuild New York City’s post-pandemic economy and long-term growth for all New Yorkers.