Alfred Tallia, MD, MPH

Dr. Tallia (B.S. Fordham, M.D. and M.P.H. Rutgers) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick. He also holds professorial appointments in the Rutgers School of Public Health and the Rutgers Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy. A university designated Master Educator, he is a Fellow in the Rutgers Center for Organizational Leadership. Born and raised in the city of Paterson, NJ, his life’s work has been to improve healthcare particularly for those most vulnerable. Under his leadership as Chair, the department's research division has emerged as a top 10 national center applying both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to the study of health system change and innovation. He is currently co-lead of the community core of NJACTS - the Rutgers, Princeton, and NJIT Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health. From 2010 to 2012, he conceptualized, developed, and led Robert Wood Johnson Partners, LLC, the nationally recognized integrated delivery system of Rutgers and the Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health System that served more than 35,000 Medicare and commercially insured lives in 7 counties of New Jersey. Under his leadership, RWJ Partners developed a network of more than 200 primary care and 700 specialty care physicians, 5 hospitals, multiple post-acute facilities, and met quality metrics at the CMS 96th percentile and financial targets to achieve $3.6M in savings. During his years as chair, he has expanded department faculty from fewer than 20 to more than 85, creating divisions of sports medicine, hospital medicine, community health, and geriatrics, and has fostered development of special programs for home visits, reproductive health, and adults with developmental disabilities, among many others. Currently, his department's educational, research, clinical, and community health offerings serve more than 100,000 people yearly.

With more than 100 published abstracts, chapters and scientific publications, he is editor and a principal author of the internationally used text Swanson’s Family Medicine Review, now in its 9th edition and published in multiple languages. In addition to his roles in New Jersey and at Rutgers, he is immediate past Chair and a current director of the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), the international non-profit responsible for developing competency assessments of physicians and other health professionals in the U.S. and multiple countries worldwide. He also is past Chair of the governing committee of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) program, the common licensure assessment pathway for all international and domestic medical school graduates. A longtime member of the NJ Healthcare Quality Institute, he has served on the executive committee of the Washington based Primary Care Collaborative, the coalition of Fortune 500 payers, providers, and consumers advancing healthcare reform, and on the boards of multiple health care organizations including Horizon (NJ Blue Cross/Blue Shield) Health Innovations and the Robert Wood Johnson Health System. He continues on the boards of Parker Health, the VNA Health Group, among several others. A Rutgers Chancellor’s Distinguished Lifetime Career awardee, he is the recipient of multiple awards from foundations and health systems, and recognition from the City of Paterson, members of Congress, and the New Jersey Legislature for his service to the public.

My research work as an academic physician has been focused on studying and improving the quality of healthcare for individuals, families, and communities, particularly for vulnerable populations. Key to this has been recognition of the importance of engaging communities and populations in defining the research agenda and promoting healthcare change through structures and relationships that facilitate scientific innovation to address health needs. H Index 24.

My early contributions to science focused on understanding the organization, functioning, and value of primary care to the healthcare system and local communities. These contributions included work demonstrating family medicine reduces patient care costs for hospitals and health systems (Academic Medicine 1994 - STFM Best Research paper award winner), describing for the first time the organizational designs of primary care practices (J Healthcare Management, 2003), understanding how to effectively change practices to improve care (Cohen, J Healthcare Management 2004), understanding characteristics of work relationships and how they contribute to successful outcomes (FP Management, 2006, and others), and examining the contributions of academic health centers to health system change. These studies were the result of funded research in which I served as PI or Co-I from a wide range of funding sources including NIH (NHLBI, NCI, NIDDK), RWJF, HRSA, PHS, and others. These have led to more than 300 publications by Rutgers faculty and affiliated collaborators from around the country. As my career has progressed and my administrative skills are in greater demand, my research role has shifted to fostering our research division faculty successes.

My more recent focus has been in experiments building health systems that address the needs of local communities. My team has designed systems that translate discoveries into service delivery vehicles while enhancing clinical care quality for populations and communities. This is translational science at the organizational level. As chair I created a community health division to work with and in the community in all mission areas. Similarly, I have ensured the community has been a key research participant in other organizations I have created or been a part of. Examples range from early work- Academic-Community Partnerships. Family Medicine (1996), to my work as founder/ executive director of RWJ Partners where we created an organization designed to solve health services problems by engaging diverse urban and rural populations and communities. Helping to build our department’s research success (top 10 schools in NIH funding), I participated in many studies and obtained federal funding to promote community based participatory research (PI, HRSA 2008-11). Examples of publications derived from these efforts: Jimenez M, et al. The Promise Clinic: Collaborative Service-Learning Approach to Increasing Access. in Underserved Population. J Healthcare Poor and Underserved (2008); Tallia AF et al. Academic Health Centers as Accountable Care Organizations. Academic Medicine (2010); Tallia AF, Howard J. An AHC … Creates an Accountable Care Organization. Health Affairs (2012); Cantor J, Tallia AF, et al. Analysis and Recommendations for Medicaid High Utilizers in NJ. (2016); Pellerano M, Jahn E, Tallia AF. The Greater New Brunswick Hotspotting Report. (2017); Tallia AF, et al. Building Family Medicine Research Through Community Engagement... J Am Board Fam Med (2025).

As co-lead of the Community Core of NJ ACTS, the NIH CTSA award, I strive to take my community engagement work and apply it to all aspects of the translational science as we foster and expand research serving all populations.