Thomas D. Sequist, MD, MPH, is an assistant professor of medicine and of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He currently practices general internal medicine at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates.
Dr. Sequist’s research agenda focuses on three areas: Native American health care; ambulatory quality-improvement strategies; and the intersection between quality of care and health disparities. He is a current Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Amos Medical Faculty Development Program Scholar, which provides support to conduct in-depth analyses of quality of care for Native Americans. Through this project, he is working closely with the Indian Health Service to measure health care quality on a national basis and identify successful methods of quality improvement in underserved settings, such as the use of electronic health records and disease registries. He is also analyzing experiences with the US health care system among Native American patients receiving care through the Indian Health Service, Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial health plans.
Beyond evaluations of quality of care, Dr. Sequist is actively involved in the organization of federally funded randomized quality-improvement trials in the outpatient setting. These trials evaluate a spectrum of strategies, including electronic medical records, decision support tools, disease registries, organizational change, and patient education, to improve care for chronic diseases, including diabetes, as well as preventive services such as cancer screening. Dr. Sequist is also actively working on understanding the complex relationship between quality-improvement activities and racial disparities in care, using diabetes as a model. Through this work, he is implementing a randomized trial involving clinician cultural competency training, health navigation, and clinician performance feedback to reduce racial disparities in diabetes care.
Dr. Sequist is committed to the advancement of Native Americans in the medical field and has served for over 10 years as a director of the Four Directions Summer Research Program at Harvard Medical School. This program offers American Indian undergraduate students a summer research experience, career advice, and long-term mentoring.
Dr. Sequist graduated from Cornell University with a BS in chemical engineering. He received his MD degree from Harvard Medical School, and his MPH degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.