The leader at the helm of the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine’s centerpiece Human Dimension curriculum has been honored as one of Modern Healthcare’s Innovators for 2026.
Carmela Rocchetti, M.D., director of the Human Dimension (HD) curriculum and assistant dean of Community Engaged Education at HMSOM, has been named a 2026 Innovators Awards individual honoree, they announced April 13. The program recognizes leaders and organizations driving innovation that improves care, achieves measurable results and contributes to clinical and financial goals, according to Modern Healthcare.
The Human Dimension is a course which makes the “community the classroom,” by pairing medical students with individuals and families from underserved communities and embeds student teams with community partners to understand what drives health outcomes in real life. Rocchetti oversees and has helped to develop the required curriculum since the medical school’s opening.
“This award is justly merited,” said Jeffrey Boscamp, M.D., president and dean of the School. “Carmela Rocchetti is a leader who has been here since the beginning, and she has done as much to develop our unique excellence as anyone else here in our community.”
The community impact of the HD course is huge, and growing.
To date, HD students have worked directly with 719 families from underserved communities and participated in more than 350 community outreach events (since 2022). HD has built a network of 126 community partners, supported 138 school districts through the Support Our Schools initiative, and led 139 Community Health Projects, co-designed with stakeholders to address locally identified needs.
HD’s longitudinal structure also drives measurable academic and systems-level outcomes, including 557 senior Capstone Projects and 53 Phase 3 Community Immersion Projects focused on addressing determinants of health. Since the initial launch, more than 500 graduates have completed this required, community-based training, expanding the pipeline of physicians prepared to deliver care for all people with compassion, respect, and cultural humility.
The HD process impacts peoples’ lives, as students learn about social determinants of health by working closely with individuals and families from underserved areas. The goal of this centerpiece of the HMSOM curriculum is to train physicians to understand that context matters and to learn how to address the social, behavioral, and environmental determinants of health. Medical students recognize and apply drivers of health outcomes; practice health care with cultural competency, humility, and sensitivity; discuss the existence and magnitude of health care inequities and collaborate with other health professionals and community members regarding these issues; and, most importantly, create solutions that address health care inequities.
Under Rocchetti’s leadership, the HD program is changing the way health care is delivered by having young physicians understand how to partner with communities to improve health. This program rose to the health challenge of our times in 2020. HD mobilized an underutilized medical student workforce to provide services for communities in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rocchetti and her team created the COVID SOS (Support our Schools) Task Force in response to the needs the communities working with HD expressed during the pandemic. Managed by students and faculty to help districts navigate COVID-19-related questions and issues, it matched medical students and faculty to school districts to aid in reopening plans; improve digital learning; provide general COVID education for parents and staff; and develop programming to meet the needs of individual schools.
The Modern Healthcare distinction is just the latest of her accolades. She has also received: the 2021 NJBiz HealthCare Hero - Education Category Award; the 2023 AAMC Northeastern Group for Educational Affairs: Excellence in Medical Education Poster Award; the 2024 EJI Excellence in Medicine Outstanding Medical Educator Award; the 2025 HMSOM Dean Bonita Stanton Humanism Faculty Award; and a 2025 Gold Humanism Honor Society Faculty induction.
A primary care doctor with HMH since 2011, Rocchetti is a first-generation college graduate who understands the challenges associated with underserved communities, firsthand. Dr. Rocchetti trained at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell, where she served as ambulatory chief resident. She is a graduate of Cornell University, where she was recognized for her commitment to service and named a Cornell National Scholar, an honor given to fewer than 1 percent of students.