Joseph S. Zickafoose, MD, MS

Joseph Zickafoose is a practicing primary care pediatrician whose research primarily focuses on access to and the quality of health care services for children.

Zickafoose directs a team focused on disseminating lessons learned from the CHIPRA Quality Demonstration Grant Program. Funded by the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009, the program aims to identify effective, replicable strategies for enhancing quality of care for children. He was the deputy director and a researcher on the team that evaluated the implementation of and outcomes from this demonstration program. Zickafoose also leads the qualitative implementation evaluation and is part of the quantitative impact evaluation team for four Health Care Innovation Awards, funded by the federal Center for Medicaid and Medicaid Innovation and focused on improving the delivery of care for children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). He is leading and contributing to multiple studies on health care access and delivery for children with special health care needs in the military health system and has studied the effects of CHIP on access to and use of health care services.

Before joining Mathematica in 2012, Zickafoose was a research fellow at the University of Michigan, and worked as a pediatric resident, chief resident, and staff pediatrician at the Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. Since joining Mathematica, he has continued to practice as a primary care pediatrician, first in the University of Michigan Health System and now in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He holds an M.S. in health and health care research from the University of Michigan and an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University. He is certified by the American Board of Pediatrics.