Latino Doctor Lauded for Work with Community, Patients

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J. Emilio Carrillo
J. Emilio Carrillo

Dr. J. Emilio Carrillo has spent his career breaking down healthcare barriers for New York residents.

Carrillo, a researcher and clinician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College, infuses a cultural competency approach in the care of individual patients.

Now his approach is being honored.

Carrillo will be given the American Medical Association Foundation’s 2015 Excellence in Medicine Award-Pride in the Profession on June 5, 2015, in Chicago.

The award recognizes physicians who exemplify the medical profession’s highest values: commitment to service, community involvement, altruism, leadership and dedication to patient care.

Carrillo does just that.

His strategy uses a patient-based, cross-cultural approach that helps bridge cultural barriers in the care of individual patients by recognizing and addressing the three cultures in the exam room: patient, provider and biomedical cultures.

He pays attention to language and health literacy as the provider applies skills to explore the patients’ meaning and environmental context in order to negotiate mutually agreeable plans of care. The development of plans of care in the setting of care coordination and care management also require the same attention to the patient’s unique social and cultural perspective.

Population health programs, according to his approach, must also be based on community needs assessments that consider the population’s social and cultural characteristics.

He applies this strategy in the clinic and community-based research.

He’s worked on many studies, such as examining the effectiveness of patient navigation for Latino cancer survivors, as leader of the northeast region of Redes En Acción, a national Latino cancer research network funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and led by the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the team behind SaludToday.

“Dr. Carrillo has dedicated his career to leading the medical community and others in cultural competency and improving community health,” said Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, director of Redes and the IHPR.

By The Numbers By The Numbers

25.1

percent

of Latinos remain without health insurance coverage

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