Billy Oglesby, PhD, MBA, MSPH, FACHE

Comparative Health Systems
U.S. Healthcare Financing & Reimbursement
Systematic Reviews & Analysis
Health Policy Analysis & Development
Integrative Research Seminar

Dr. Oglesby is a population health strategist, scientist, and results-driven leader with more than 25 years of consulting and operational experience improving population health outcomes, driving operational efficiency, and expanding access to prevention and care services.  He has worked with payors, providers, academic medical centers, life science companies, digital health firms, government agencies, community organizations, and other stakeholders to drive meaningful and sustainable population health improvement across a continuum of upstream and downstream initiatives.

As the Humana Dean of the College of Population Health,  he leads all functions of the College, including program growth and evaluation, enrollment management, faculty development and oversight, research expansion, alumni engagement, student support services, and philanthropic efforts. He works with key leaders across the Jefferson enterprise and with stakeholders locally, nationally, and globally to develop new academic initiatives that promote healthcare quality and patient safety, improve operational effectiveness and efficiency, and advance public and population health.  At Jefferson, he created a year-long Quality Improvement & Patient Safety Leadership Program for providers and service line administrators at Jefferson Health, Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, Wills Eye Hospital, and Nemours Children’s Health to increase the number of quality and safety leaders across the health systems.  He also created a team of methodologists and analysts to enhance rigor of population health and quality improvement research, inform revisions to enterprise dashboards, and support publication of findings to enhance Jefferson’s national reputation as a leader in population health.

In 2018, he launched a health system-based population health research center in partnership with Main Line Health, which has published over 25 scientific articles, successfully obtained extramural funding, and is now a full partner on several NIH grant-funded initiatives.  The following year, he led the development of a community-based population health center in partnership with a local foundation in rural Western Pennsylvania to create a network of care coordination agencies and community health workers focused on closing healthcare gaps and addressing social determinants of health.  In just three years the Center received over 1,000 referrals and contracted with five health insurance companies to provide services to at-risk clients.

Prior to Jefferson, Dr. Oglesby was a member of the Founding Faculty at the Kent State University College of Public Health.  He created and taught in a top-ranked online Master of Public Health program in Health Policy & Management; conducted IRS-compliant Community Health Needs Assessments and consulted on population health improvement plans for adult, children, and specialty hospitals in the region; and led a collaborative of local government agencies and foundations to fund HIV prevention programs and related policy analysis. He also directed a federally funded regional clinical women’s health program, which successfully increased the number of minority patients served, increased the number of teens served and continuously using highly effective contraception, doubled the number of clients receiving routine HIV testing, and tripled the number of partnerships with community organizations.

Prior to Kent State, Dr. Oglesby served in numerous roles at the University of South Carolina for 10 years.  He directed the operations of a federally funded capacity-building program for non-profit organizations, a foundation-funded capacity-building program for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and evaluated a multi-site after-school enrichment program for at-risk youth.  He led a successful University-wide initiative to obtain institutional designation in community engagement from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and created a new business model for the University’s Office of Public Health Practice to provide technical assistance and program evaluation services to health-related governmental agencies and non-profit organizations in the community.

At the national level, Dr. Oglesby serves as the elected President of the Association for Prevention Teaching & Research (formerly the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine), which is the nation’s leading voice for advancing prevention and public health education, training, and research in preventive medicine programs, graduate programs in public health, medical school departments with a population health focus, and other health professions schools.  He is the Chair of the Healthy People 2030 Curriculum Taskforce, which comprises the national associations of colleges and schools of osteopathic and allopathic medicine, nursing and nurse practitioners, pharmacy, dentistry, physician assistants, and other health professions.  The Taskforce continually updates the Clinical Prevention and Population Health Curriculum for health professions schools and has stewardship over Healthy People objectives focused on increasing health promotion, disease prevention, population health and interprofessional learning experiences for US students in health professions education programs—the only non-federal agency with stewardship over Healthy People objectives. 

Dr. Oglesby is an ex officio member of the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement at the National Academy of Medicine, where he recently helped plan a national workshop for thought leaders on The Role of Business in Improving Health and Health Equity.  He is an appointed public member on the Clinical Guidelines Committee at the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (UK), Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, and a Board Leadership Fellow at the National Association for Corporate Directors.

Dr. Oglesby has worked on a career total of over $40M in external funding, including over $10M as Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI in a variety of population health areas, including substance abuse, sexual and reproductive health, lifestyle medicine, health system science, interprofessional practice, and others. This work has been supported by federal agencies, state and local governments, foundations, and non-governmental organizations. He has given over 70 scientific and thought leadership presentations at scholarly and professional conferences and published 50+ journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports, including authoring the foundational competencies for the practice of lifestyle medicine for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and editing the seminal textbook in the field, Population Health: Creating a Culture of Wellness. He is a reviewer for several leading scientific journals in his field and serves as Associate Editor of Population Health Management and the American Journal of Medical Quality.  He is also Chair of the Annual Population Health Colloquium, a national conference convening some of the most influential people in healthcare transformation.

As an active member of the community, he is a former Court Appointed Special Advocate and Guardian Ad Litem (CASA/GAL) where he advocated for abused, neglected, and dependent children in the juvenile and family courts and in the foster care system. He is a Lifetime Member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Lifetime Member of the National Action Network (NAN), Federal Club Member at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Frontline Member of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and a member of the President’s Circle at Thomas Jefferson University.

Dr. Oglesby earned a bachelor’s degree in corporate finance and master’s and doctoral degrees in health behavior from the University of South Carolina, an MBA in healthcare strategy from Kent State University, and is a graduate of Advanced Finance Program at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Oglesby can be reached at Billy.Oglesby@Jefferson.edu.