MD – Louisiana State University School of Medicine, New Orleans, LA
Residency – Internal Medicine, Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, CT

Biography: Dr. Jacob Quinton entered the clinical scholars program with interests in improving the value of Medicaid to high-risk populations, especially for patients with high levels of social complexity. His research during the NCSP (which bridged the pandemic) became focused on the expansion of telemedicine and the potential consequences for access to care among both urban and rural patients. His core interest, however, has been public service.

At Tulane, he was awarded local funding to promote enrollment in the Medicaid 1115 waiver (Greater New Orleans Community Health Connection) established following Hurricane Katrina to stabilize primary care in the New Orleans region and completed his public health analysis on New Orleans area and national trends in homelessness policy.  

During medical school Dr. Quinton held local, state, and national leadership positions. He founded and led the interdisciplinary New Orleans Student Hotspotters and was awarded external funding to implement a patient navigation program for high risk patients in the New Orleans safety net, as well as an evidence-based reproductive health education program the New Orleans Adolescent Reproductive Health Project. At the state level, he was a member of the Louisiana state medical society delegation to the American Medical Association, and he was one of two medical students nationally elected to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. 

Following medical school Dr. Quinton trained in internal medicine/primary care at Yale New Haven Hospital, where he was awarded a distinction in quality improvement/physician leadership and rotated externally at New York City Health and Hospitals’ physician leadership as well as participating in the Stanford/Johnson & Johnson global health elective as a founding trainee at the Grundy County, Tennessee site. There he worked at a free clinic serving the most socioeconomically disadvantaged county in Tennessee. 

As a scholar, Dr. Quinton partnered with UnitedHealthcare’s Community and State (Medicaid) programs and developed an approach to identifying high risk patients through first stratification by risk, then segmenting into high-risk subgroups using machine learning techniques. He was mentored in this work by Dr. Carol Mangione (UCLA) and Dr. Kenrik Duru (UCLA), and was awarded the competitive NIH Loan Repayment Award (LRP) through the National Institute of Aging “Improving the Care of High-Need Medicaid Patients Across the Life Course.” He also completed a policy externship with the UnitedHealthcare individual exchange team, led by former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation clinical scholar Dr. Katherine Neuhausen.  

Dr. Quinton was very productive during his two-year fellowship. A selection of his first-author published work includes an analysis of telemedicine implementation in the Medicare program in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society “Characteristics of Medicare beneficiaries utilizing telemedicine after July 2020” mentored by Drs. Michael Ong (UCLA/WLA VA) and Maria Han (UCLA), and “The Association of Broadband Internet Access and Telemedicine Utilization in Rural Western Tennessee: An Observational Study” with the same mentorship team.  

Following NCSP, Dr. Quinton accepted a position as Medical Officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, in the Patient Care Models Group, which implements value-based payment models to improve the efficiency of the Medicare program. There he seeks to improve equity as a principal component of value in the Medicare program.