Before coming to Dartmouth, Shruthi Patchava interned at Hospital Pasteur in Nice, France. Under her physician mentor she studied France’s National Health Insurance Model of healthcare delivery and explored the impact on health outcomes for refugees who had fled to France from the Syrian crisis. The work deepened her passion to develop culturally relevant healthcare delivery models that better meet the diverse needs of patients. 

Soon after, Patchava gained exposure to how policy and business interact with medicine as a senior consultant at the healthcare firm, Cloudmed. There she worked with both patient and financial data to identify administrative barriers to providing care. A yearning to build on her experiences to study healthcare systems in real time and identify population-level solutions drew her to Dartmouth’s 11-month, on-campus MPH program. 

“I admired The Dartmouth Institute’s curriculum because the program cultivates a classroom experience that mirrors the complexities of the real-world industry,” Patchava says.

“The cohort represents students with a broad range of professional experience in healthcare, and the faculty emphasizes research and education across health policy, healthcare finance, equity, and healthcare delivery science.”

At Dartmouth, Patchava honed her research interests in community-based health initiatives through her work as Global Health Fellow. She was also mentored by professors Manish Mishra, MD, MPH and JoAnna Leyenaar, MD, PhD, MPH while striving to develop a framework for formally studying socio-cultural factors that could affect the healthcare response to the ongoing Ebola epidemic. 

Patchava and The Dartmouth Institute Class of 2020 completed their MPH degree as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. As the world began to grapple with an overwhelming amount of information (and misinformation) about the pandemic, Patchava and some of her peers cofounded a public health website based on COVID-19 facts. They sought to utilize their training in analytic epidemiology and research to communicate evidence-based knowledge on relevant health trends, especially during and about the pandemic. 

“The Dartmouth Institute’s emphasis on data-driven analyses provided us with the foundation to develop this platform. COVID-19 highlighted the benefits and risks of knowledge sharing via online platforms, so I sought to gain more experience in understanding how population trends are influenced by the technology communities utilize in their day-to-day lives,” Patchava says. “This motivated me to broaden my experience working with big data, which led to my work now in global product operations at Facebook, Inc.”

In Patchava's current role, she works cross-functionally with engineering, development, operations and business teams to analyze how the quality of a technology product can be improved to benefit communities. She hopes to bridge this experience with her experience in healthcare to continue to work on products within the healthcare technology industry.

"The most resounding trait that I noticed in my cohort was their relentless curiosity. I spent my year at Dartmouth inspired by peers who each had unique insights into the direction in which they wanted to see the healthcare industry go.

As students of public health, we were all unified on the belief that healthcare is a basic human right—that all lives have equal value and that healthcare systems should provide similar treatments for similar needs."

Yet, the core of our curriculum at The Dartmouth Institute highlighted the concept that variation exists in healthcare. "During my time at Dartmouth, I witnessed my peers work towards interventions tailored to the realities and risks of the populations they are passionate about."