Top 25 Innovators - 2021

Tallaj founded Somos Community Care in 2015. The not-for-profit serves nearly 650,000 multilingual Medicaid beneficiaries in New York City. It was part of a five-year state-sponsored program, which ended in 2020, aimed at improving care coordination and reducing avoidable hospitalizations. In year four, Somos’ efforts helped reduce preventable hospitalizations by 14%, decrease pediatric hospital admissions by 9% and cut preventable emergency department visits for patients with behavioral health diagnoses by 12%, among other improvements. During the pandemic, Somos established one of the state’s first COVID-19 testing sites and was early in warning public health officials about high positivity rates among Latinos in Queens and the Bronx. It set up 70 trilingual testing sites, testing more than 700,000 people.