Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD
Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD, an expert in the design of community health systems for underserved populations in the United States and abroad, has joined Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as Director of The Arnhold Global Health Institute, and Vice Chair of Population Health in the Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine.
In his dual roles, Dr. Singh will help the Icahn School of Medicine and the Mount Sinai Health System align global and domestic health activities, and integrate advances in domestic population health with economic principles, biomedical advances, and systems science.
The Arnhold Global Health Institute was created in 2014 to provide education and research into global health issues, and promote collaboration among Mount Sinai’s physicians, scientists, and trainees with their colleagues around the world.
Dr. Singh—who will serve as the Institute’s first Director—says Mount Sinai’s extensive technological and scientific resources will enable the Institute to help solve health crises in areas of the world that are data-poor.
“Parasitic diseases like malaria and hookworm are often hyper-local, and thanks to rapid diagnostic tests, we can begin to map symptoms and disease patterns to better understand where we need to target our resources,” says Dr. Singh. “Once that big data perspective has brought us to the right general area, we need to listen closely to people in order to know how to adapt technologies and co-create care models to their specific needs.”
On-site information-gathering will be carried out by medical students, residents, and faculty of The Arnhold Global Health Institute, who will be engaged in “real-life problem solving,” says Dr. Singh. In 2011, he chaired the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign, a partnership supported by the United Nations that is dedicated to training and mobilizing lay workers to deliver health care to the rural poor. “It’s really exciting for students to be in a learning environment that’s focused on doing something positive in the world,” he adds.
During his residency training at Icahn School of Medicine, Dr. Singh and his wife Manmeet Kaur created a program known as City Health Works, which was modeled after programs that Dr. Singh helped build in struggling villages in sub-Saharan Africa. City Health Works hires and trains a network of community-based health coaches in East and Central Harlem, who are overseen by clinical professionals. The coaches work closely with patients to help them manage their chronic health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, and depression.
“We’ve built an extraordinary team of physicians and coaches who have become an integral part of the Mount Sinai primary care system,” he says. “Our goal is to pioneer a scalable care model that’s neighborhood based. The impressive patient outcomes City Health Works is beginning to post bring that vision closer to reality.”
Prior to joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Singh served as Director of Systems Design at the Earth Institute, and Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs, both at Columbia University. He received his MD from Weill Cornell Medical College and his PhD in Neural and Genetic Systems at Rockefeller University.