Shashank Somasundaram, MD

My name is Shashank Somasundaram and I am currently a PGY-3 at Washington University in St. Louis. SAEM has been instrumental in my journey into academic emergency medicine over the past decade, and it is a privilege to be considered for a position on the RAMS board.

Advocacy has always been at the heart of my motivation to pursue medicine. As an undergraduate, I leveraged public-private partnerships to bring public health innovations to emergency settings to address important issues like food insecurity & naloxone distribution. In medical school, my advocacy evolved toward optimizing healthcare delivery. I quickly realized how important operational improvement and innovation in healthcare services were in improving patient outcomes, sparking my interest in operations work. Around the same time, I too began to feel the burden that the COVID-19 pandemic began to exert on frontline workers and authored a policy proposal with the AMA to advocate for making permanent the expansion of telemental health access in Virginia. In residency, I’ve been focused on advocating for initiatives to improve both throughput and resident wellbeing.

I would not be where I am without countless RAMS webinars, resources, Annual Meetings, grant funding, faculty mentors, and more. A few of my priorities as a Member-at-Large for RAMS this year are to:

1. Create educational content on the business of medicine including practice types, operations, reimbursement, and malpractice, so that residents are better equipped to navigate and influence the systems in which they practice, and to sustain both personal wellness and institutional effectiveness.
2. Expand on existing inter-committee channels for ideas that cross-link national expertise with local action. Eg. A resident journal reviewer program mentored by faculty at their own institutions to enhance academic engagement while fostering scholarship at home institutions.
3. Pilot a “Micro-Initiatives in EM” series that helps residents launch small, high-impact projects that improve wellness and patient flow in their departments, and establishing RAMS as an incubator for innovation and well-being in EM.

I hope to bring my unique perspective and interests to shape the RAMS board and its programming for the upcoming year. Thank you for your consideration.