Ramon Tallaj, Founder and Chairman of the Board, SOMOS Community Care; Internist

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.

Originally from the Dominican Republic, Tallaj 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, he 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, Tallaj founded SOMOS Community Care, a non-profit, physician-led network of 2,500 culturally competent healthcare providers who serve quality and preventative care to over 1 million Medicaid and Medicare patients in New York City’s most vulnerable communities. SOMOS was one of 25 Performing Provider Systems in New York’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment Program.

Tallaj has been on the frontlines and active in calling global attention to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in communities of color, escalating with illnesses and mortality rates in New York's inner cities. During its darkest days, Tallaj was responsible for the launch and operation of over 125 trilingual COVID-19 testing sites in English, Spanish and Chinese. Testing over 1.5 million people nationally, he fed and served 2 million meals to his food-insecure neighbors while providing accessible healthcare to high-risk immigrant populations including the undocumented during a period of extreme medical crisis. Tallaj’s organization proved to be an even greater resource for New York City when he set up the first calling centers in five different languages, provided free multi-language health education materials and offered tele-health services in the depths of the COVID-19 crisis. On April 28, 2021, under Tallaj’s leadership, SOMOS became the first primary care network in the State of New York to receive the COVID-19 vaccines directly to their medical offices as a solution to help combat racial disparity, misinformation and vaccine hesitancy.

Tallaj’s success in providing accessible healthcare for immigrant communities of color can be
attributed to his foresight in creating a national model for equitable healthcare that places linguistic and cultural competency first in the poorest immigrant communities around the country. To date, Tallaj has overseen the administration of SOMOS’s 2 million COVID-19 vaccine doses at locations ranging from landmark mega-sites such as Yankee Stadium, Grand Central Terminal, SOMOS’s medical offices and New York City Housing Authority public housing developments.

Tallaj was appointed as the co-chairman of New York City’s COVID-19 Recovery Roundtable and Health Equity Task Force. Tallaj advises on comprehensive policies focusing on health equity and healthcare access to help rebuild the city’s post-pandemic economy and long-term growth for all New Yorkers. Tallaj’s work includes numerous humanitarian missions over the course of his career, including a delegation of bilingual SOMOS network physicians from New York to Puerto Rico in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Tallaj continues to promote, share, and implement resources that provide quality preventive healthcare for those in need.