Jennifer Stephens, DO, Tightens the Lens on Quality for Jefferson and LVHN

What does quality really mean in health care? From the perspective of Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN), now proudly part of Jefferson Health, quality means providing the care you need to achieve and maintain optimal health; and when you are sick or injured, providing the best possible health care experience. By keeping you healthy and helping you avoid chronic diseases that are costly to treat, you receive health care value. This overarching goal is at the heart of what Jennifer Stephens, DO, does every day.

A longtime primary care practitioner and Chief Medical Officer with Lehigh Valley Physician Group, Dr. Stephens recently stepped into the role of Chief Medical Officer, Ambulatory Quality and Population Health, with Jefferson Health. Her title describes her two categories of responsibility.

“Ambulatory quality involves care at outpatient settings. This is an opportunity to help individual people become healthier,” Dr. Stephens says, noting that across the United States, 73 percent of people are obese or overweight and over half are diabetic or prediabetic. “We reach out to those not seeking care and find ways to bring them in.”

This is part of the process of improving health. The more a person participates in preventive care – seeing a clinician when needed, getting routine health screenings and taking care of themselves – the better chance they have of staying healthy. 

“Population health is where we look through a 50,000-foot lens and ask, ‘How do we take better care of our community?’” she says. “Ambulatory quality care and population health dovetail together, sort of like peanut butter and jelly. One affects the other.”  

Dr. Stephens spent her youngest years in Pennsylvania and “grew up around medicine.” Her mother and grandmother were nurses, her sister is a pharmacist and many family friends were physicians. “I was a candy striper and then an EMT in college,” she says. “We would drop off the patient at the emergency department, but I always wanted to know what came after. I wanted to know how they were helped.”

Throughout her education and career, Dr. Stephens held administrative roles in addition to clinical practice. Greatly influenced by Donald Berwick, MD, a professor at Harvard School of Public Health who founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), she took a turn toward health care quality.

“He taught me that we can learn how to continuously improve and direct a career toward making health care better for patients,” Dr. Stephens says.

Consequently, she dove deeper. Dr. Stephens earned an IHI Open School Quality Improvement Certificate (2012), Certificates of Achievement in the Physician Leadership Program through the VHA Mid-Atlantic/Jefferson School of Population Health (2014) and the Jefferson School of Population Health Academy Certificate Program (2015), and a Master of Business Administration from DeSales University (2021). These credentials further extended her long list of medical certifications, administrative appointments, awards and honors, board memberships, teaching experiences and journal publications.

One recent award was the Lehigh Valley Women of Influence from Lehigh Valley Business, which she received in 2024 along with two other LVHN colleagues. 

Now that LVHN and Jefferson are one organization, Dr. Stephens has found a productive and satisfying niche. There was always a shared purpose between the organizations, and increased quality and value continue to be fundamental. To ensure universal understanding, clinicians, staff and administrators have participated in retreats, where each part of the organization learns from the other.

“The back and forth is what’s so exciting,” Dr. Stephens says. “They ask how we do this, and we ask how they do that. It’s like bringing two puzzle pieces together.”

Dr. Stephens points out that, underlying their compatible vision for quality, value and population health, Jefferson and LVHN have a singular focus: to keep everyone healthy and thriving.

“Our combination with Jefferson gives us opportunities we never would have had,” she says. “We can now leverage additional resources, skills and health care professionals to help people in our communities live better lives.”