Jordan Albritton, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Jordan Albritton 2016 DSSF FellowHost Site: Intermountain Healthcare
Research Interests: Delivery of healthcare services; quality improvement; implementation science; program evaluation; and healthcare teams.




Dr. Albritton has a Ph.D. in health policy and management at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his studies focused on organizational behavior and implementation science. Jordan’s dissertation was part of a program evaluation of Project Fives Alive, a nationwide effort to reduce under-5 mortality in Ghana by developing local quality improvement teams. His dissertation specifically focused on the impact of team-level factors on the performance of hospital-based quality improvement teams. He has also collaborated on research efforts to evaluate the meaningful use of electronic health records and to assess primary care practices' capacity for quality improvement. Jordan pursued the DSSF to gain additional hands-on training and experience in a delivery system setting conducting research with direct operational value. He is looking forward to the opportunity to work on projects evaluating the implementation of clinical process innovations and other system-wide interventions as a fellow at Intermountain Healthcare.

Jill Nault Connors, Ph.D., M.S.S.W.

Jill Nault Connors, 2016 DSSF FellowHost Site: Geisinger Health System
Research Interests: Patient experience of care among vulnerable populations; access to behavioral health and medication therapy management services; patient-centered approaches to quality improvement; and patient-provider interactions.


Dr. Jill Nault Connors received her Ph.D. in health outcomes & policy research from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, Tennessee.  Her dissertation research focused on the impact of “super-utilization” on geographic variation in population-based rates of readmission and per capita readmission expenditures among local healthcare delivery systems. She has participated in several national and federally-funded research and quality improvement projects including a Health Care Innovation Award through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative, and the National Institutes of Health-sponsored Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) randomized controlled trial. In addition, she served as a care transitions consultant for Tennessee’s Medicare Quality Improvement Organization under the 10th Scope of Work and as a Co-Principal Investigator on a state-funded minority health initiative grant to implement a community-based translation of the DPP. The DSS Fellowship will allow her to increase focus on the integrated delivery of health services in rural areas, the collection of social risk factors within medical records, and patient-centered approaches to care driven by patient experience.

Nicolae Done, Ph.D. 

Nicolae Done, 2016 DSSF FellowHost Site: Boston University (in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs) 
Research Interests: Service delivery innovations; access and quality; payment incentives; and comparative effectiveness.



Dr. Nicolae Done completed his Ph.D. in health economics and policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Done’s research focuses on the effects of payment incentives on health care quality, access, and cost. He has evaluated the impact of global budget programs in Maryland on the utilization of hospital services and the quality of outpatient care. Dr. Done has also been involved in international projects involving comparative health care financing and health system reform. As a DSSF fellow, Dr. Done plans to examine the impact of new innovative initiatives in the Veterans Affairs (VA) health system on veterans’ access to health care, service quality, and provider productivity. He also plans to use the VA data to conduct comparative effectiveness analyses of prescription medications using real world evidence.

Jiang Li, Ph.D., M.P.H.

 Jiang Li, 2016 DSSF FellowHost Site: Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute 
Research Interests: Multilevel interventions for obesity, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and smoking; program implementation and evaluation; racial and ethnic health disparities; health information seeking; and physician-patient communication. 


Dr. Li’s research focuses on prevention, chronic disease management, and psychosocial factors in obesity, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and smoking with a strong emphasis on disadvantaged populations. She graduated with a Ph.D. in health behavior from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Her dissertation focused on understanding how worksite-based multilevel interventions influence employee’s weight. Throughout her graduate study at UNC, she worked on multiple National Cancer Institute (NCI), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and National Institutes for Health-funded studies. As well as on interdisciplinary work including the Patient Safety Culture Survey Study at UNC Health Care System, the North Carolina Trimming Risk In Men (TRIM) Project, the Cancer Understanding Today Study (CUTS), the WAY to Health project, and the FITShop project. As a former Los Angeles Area Health Services Research Training Program postdoctoral fellow, she examined the contextual and individual level factors affecting access and health services utilization among Korean Americans and designed a mixed methods study to examine needs and barriers to lung cancer screening among Asian American smokers. As a DSSF fellow, she is currently working on a study to investigate the underlying causes of disparities in cardiovascular disease among Asian and Pacific Islander residents in Hawaii and northern California.  Prior to her doctoral training, Dr. Li earned her M.P.H. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Prior, she received a bachelor of medicine degree in preventive medicine from Fudan University and worked for Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Shanghai, China.

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