Health Policy & Management

As an undergraduate at Case Western, Taroon Amin was troubled by how management principles could be successfully applied to the field of healthcare. "I had studied management theory in the classroom, but from everything I read it did not seem to be working in the real world." Taroon decided to take what he'd learned majoring in Management with a concentration in International Health and use it to consider, explore, and analyze foreign healthcare systems firsthand. He spent several years abroad. In Beijing, he studied the effect of China's political and economic changes on the delivery of healthcare. In Paris, he examined the impact of state health and welfare reforms on continental Europe. And in Ahmedabad, he conducted qualitative research on India's economic development challenges. His studies, which included visiting hospitals and clinics and talking with corporate and government authorities, enabled him to see the complexities of the "public health infrastructure and health system analysis. Cross national comparisons require us to keep the social contract of countries in the forefront of our work. Without it our analysis has little meaning."

Taroon continued his studies at the Mailman School, where he completed his MPH with a Health Policy and Management concentration. While working on his masters, Taroon applied his talent at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital in two roles, Analyst of Quality and Finance at NYP/Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital and later as a Black Belt/Improvement Manager across all of NYP’s major campuses. Taroon worked extensively at NYP/Weill Cornell to develop a predictive model for patient flow along with his colleagues at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). "One of my goals was to blend my experience at NYP and classroom theory from Mailman to develop innovative solutions."

Taroon was recently awarded the prestigious National Institutes of Health, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Fellowship. He plans to use this fellowship to begin his PhD at the Heller School at Brandeis University in the fall of 2009. Taroon will build upon his academic and professional experience to research characteristics of highly successful Clinical Microsystems and the influence of organizational frameworks on healthcare quality. “My experience internationally, at Columbia and at New York-Presbyterian has helped to provide the practical backdrop from which I hope to shape my future research.”