Fletcher Prize Winner Evaluates the Feasibility of Scaling Hospital-quality Care in the Home
Each year, we award a prize for the most outstanding scholarly paper on a topic in population medicine written by a Harvard Medical School or Harvard School of Dental Medicine student. We are pleased to announce that HMS student Marium Raza has been awarded the 2025 Fletcher Prize in Population Medicine.
Marium is a fourth-year medical student who will begin her residency in orthopedic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City this summer. She discussed with us how hospital-at-home, a care model offering home-based treatment and monitoring for patients, could be especially beneficial for the population she hopes to treat, and how skills she learned in a course led by Institute faculty propelled her to critically evaluate the topic.
Q: Tell us a bit about your paper exploring an alternative to inpatient care: the provision of hospital-level care in patients’ homes. What drew you to explore this topic?
A: My paper, Hospital at Home – Moving from Promise to Practice, examines the growing use of remote monitoring and digital tools to deliver acute care in patients’ homes. As someone with a passion for digital health technologies and a research background in AI to improve patient outcomes, I was drawn to this topic because hospital-at-home programs sit at the intersection of technology, clinical care, and health systems innovation. Remote patient monitoring is central to how these programs operate, and while the model holds a lot of promise, I wanted to critically evaluate whether it’s truly feasible and beneficial at scale.
In addition, as someone pursuing a career in orthopedic surgery, I believe that hospital-at-home care could be especially impactful for orthopedic patients—supporting recovery in a more comfortable, familiar environment. This paper gave me the chance to explore how we can move beyond the promise of hospital-at-home care to actually make it work for patients in real-world settings.
The [Fletcher] prize felt like a natural opportunity to build on what I was learning and contribute my perspective on how we can thoughtfully implement these models to improve patient care.
Q: How did you hear about the Fletcher Prize, and why did you decide to submit?
A: I first learned about the Fletcher Prize through my Essentials of the Profession II course, which encouraged me to think more critically about population health and healthcare delivery. During the course, we also had faculty presentations on hospital-at-home programs, which pushed me to explore the topic further. The prize felt like a natural opportunity to build on what I was learning and contribute my perspective on how we can thoughtfully implement these models to improve patient care.
Marium Raza is a fourth-year student at Harvard Medical School. She grew up in Seattle, WA as the oldest of three siblings, and went to the University of Washington for undergrad, where she studied biochemistry and comparative history of ideas. Her research interests include health tech, and AI in surgery. She also loves watching movies, hiking, and cooking on the weekends (especially Pakistani food). This summer she will be starting residency in orthopedic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
About the Fletcher Prize in Population Medicine
The Fletcher Prize, named for Department of Population Professors Emeriti Suzanne and Robert Fletcher, who are national leaders in advancing the field of clinical epidemiology, is awarded by the Department for the best paper on a topic in Population Medicine written by a Harvard Medical School or Harvard School of Dental Medicine student.
Papers are judged by an expert panel of DPM faculty and awarded with a $1000 prize.