Summer with Ziqitza Health Care Limited

 David Dillon spent his summer in India working for Ziqitza Health Care Limited. 

"My path to medical school has been slightly circuitous, involving both an MPH and a PhD in Epidemiology before arriving at WCMC as a bright-eyed MS1. Given my background, I was looking for a summer project that allowed me to utilize my population-based health skillset. With this in mind, I worked with Dr. Satchit Balsari and the WCMC Office of Global Health to design a project that focused on my particular interests. The project we ultimately created involved traveling to India to work as a consultant for Ziqitza Health Care Limited, a large private ambulance company based in several states.

My work mainly involved assessing data quality, observing data collection methods, and analyzing the data for temporal and special trends that could be utilized to increase ambulance efficiency. The data itself was phenomenal, as the company had been collecting data in multiple states for several years, having served over 1.5 million patients in one arm of their operation alone. Furthermore, the opportunity to travel through Indian states, and examine their health infrastructure up-close, was particularly rewarding.

Overall, I found Ziqitza to be a fantastic company to collaborate with, and the consulting work itself to be extremely interesting. Both the faculty at WCMC and the Office for Global Health Education are supportive of unusual projects pursued by students with different interests and abilities. This project was only made possible through long standing connections between Ziqitza and the New York-Presbyterian Emergency Department, and it was an honor to represent the school and the hospital to an outside entity."

-David Dillon, WCMC, MD Class of 2017