A magazine once called her “The Nurse Innovator.” It was a title that fit Diane Ramy Faulconer (BS ’74, MSM ’74) well.
As an emergency care and ambulatory services administrator for Mount Sinai Hospital in the 1970s, she assigned nurses to senior food centers to check seniors’ blood pressure and discuss their medications, and had vans available to bring potentially at-risk seniors to the geriatric outpatient clinic. She travelled the world, studying healthcare systems in Scandinavia, as well as Socialist and Communist countries during the Cold War, to see which practices might move the U.S. healthcare system forward. She studied health care management specialties such as operating rooms, ambulatory services and emergency medicine administrative services during her undergraduate work in Health Care Management.
As a student in the Masters in Management program at FIU’s College of Business, she found kindred spirits in fellow students who had life experience, and faculty members who wanted them to succeed. She took finance and accounting courses that supported her ambitions, and helped build the groundwork for the development of new business practices in healthcare administration.
As an executive management consultant specializing in surgical and emergency management services at Ernst & Young, she consulted in over 100 hospitals in the U.S.
and Canada.
The concept of enabling hard work and uplifting ambitious students led her to establish the Prentiss Lee Faulconer, Jr. and Diane Ramy Faulconer Endowment Fund, which also serves to further the work of her late husband, known as Lee.
Faulconer’s investment in FIU will be used to award scholarships for graduate students in disciplines that reflected their work in the fields of business and nursing. At the College of Business, the scholarship will support graduate students in the fields of accounting, finance and health informatics.
“Without outside support for our academic institutions, there is no way that students and professions can evolve,” she said. “I hope that our contribution motivates many others to consider the lasting benefits of planned giving and the positive impact it will have on countless students.”