Rate My Professor Jack Owens

Dr. Jack Owens, MD, MPH, CPE, FAAP, serves as Professor and Chief of the Division of Neonatology in the Department of Pediatrics at East Tennessee State University Quillen College of Medicine. He is also NICU Medical Director at Niswonger Children’s Hospital, Johnson City Medical Center, part of Ballad Health, a position he has held since June 2022. Prior to joining ETSU, Owens was NICU Medical Director at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, a Georgia-designated regional perinatal center, from August 2016 to May 2022. There, he led multidisciplinary quality restructuring with eight dyad-led continuous improvement teams, achieving sustained improvements in very low birth weight infant outcomes including mortality, severe retinopathy of prematurity, necrotizing enterocolitis, secondary bacterial infections, and severe intraventricular hemorrhage from 2015 to 2022. He also served as Chief Medical Quality Officer for Phoebe Physician Group (2017-2021) and Phoebe Putney Health System (2018-2021).

Owens earned his MD from Emory University School of Medicine in 1992, completed pediatrics residency and neonatology fellowship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (1992-1995 and 1995-1998), and obtained an MPH in Perinatal Epidemiology from UAB in 1998. He is dually board-certified in General Pediatrics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics Perinatal Subsection, and Certified Physician Executive. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles in Mississippi NICUs, serving as President of the Mississippi Society of Newborn Medicine (2002-2008) and coordinating Vermont Oxford Network quality collaboratives that reduced nosocomial infections from 22% to 5% and admission hypothermia from 33% to 5%. Owens has authored publications on neonatal quality improvement and perinatal epidemiology, including “Multi-Hospital Community NICU Quality Improvement Improves Survival of ELBW Infants” (Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association, August 2015), “Assessing Need and Distribution of Neonatal Intensive Care Beds in Mississippi” (June 2008), and several peer-reviewed articles on COVID-19 outcomes such as “Characteristics and Clinical Outcomes of Adult Patients Hospitalized with COVID-19 - Georgia, March 2020” (MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep, 2020). His interests include healthcare delivery microsystems to reduce care variation and predictive analytics for infant care. He advises the Tennessee Initiative for Perinatal Quality Care.