Jim Walton, DO, MBA, FACP
Dr. Jim Walton is President of JWalton, LLC a healthcare consultancy firm with expertise in physician-owned value networks, risk-bearing accountable care organizations, and safety net care delivery focused on sustainability in patient-centered healthcare financing, delivery redesign, and health equity improvement.
Dr. Walton has a 40+ year history in healthcare starting as a private practice general internist in Waxahachie, TX, growing the practice with his partners to a large 20-physician multi-specialty primary care clinic serving the residents of Ellis County, TX. As the group’s managing partner, he developed outreach to the region’s uninsured population establishing two rural health clinics and house calls program, partnering with the local Ellis County Baylor Health Care System’s community hospitals.
Dr. Walton transitioned to Baylor Health Care System’s VP of Community Health, establishing nine Baylor- supported safety net clinics and a house calls program, Baylor Community Care, within the DFW service area. Subsequently, he served as the Chief Health Equity Officer, creating Baylor’s first Health Equity Report, evaluating and reporting disparities in access, care delivery and outcomes for Baylor’s regional hospital network. When Baylor developed its Accountable Care Organization, Baylor Quality Alliance, Dr. Walton served as its VP of Network Performance.
More recently, he served as the President and CEO of Dallas-based Genesis Physicians Group, comprising more than 1,650 physician members representing more than 50 specialties. During his tenure he established Genesis’ joint-venture Accountable Care Organization, Genovista Health, a physician-led, clinically-integrated network engaged in population health management and value-based contracting with Medicare, Medicaid, and Commercial populations in rural and urban communities across North Texas.
From 2002–2012, he provided strategic leadership and medical direction for the Dallas County Medical Society’s Project Access Dallas, a volunteer network of more than 2,000 physicians and 15 hospitals providing comprehensive health care access to uninsured people throughout Dallas County. In 2009, he received the prestigious DCMS Charles Max Cole Leadership Award and was elected to serve as President of the 7,000+ physician member Dallas County Medical Society in 2015. In 2016, Dr. Walton was elected to Fellowship in the American College of Physicians. In 2022, he was appointed to the Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC), An independent federal advisory committee making recommendations to the Secretary of HHS on stakeholder-submitted physician-focused payment models and related topics.
Dr. Walton is a 1982 graduate of the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center, Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine. He completed his Internal Medicine residency at Methodist Hospitals of Dallas, Board Certified in Internal Medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. Dr. Walton earned an MBA from the University of Michigan in 2009 and joined the adjunct faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas, Naveen Jindal School of Business in 2016.
He is married to Dr. Rhonda Walton, has four adult children and two grandchildren. In his leisure time, he enjoys hiking, scuba diving, gardening, and teaching healthcare management to graduate students and physicians at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is also an active volunteer using his business skills working with incarcerated felons in a Texas-based Prison Entrepreneurship Program (pep.org).
Why We Care...
It was March 2001, I was 44 years old, and neither “9/11” nor “the ACA” had occurred yet.
I was in the fourth year of my new clinical and management work at Baylor Health Care System in Dallas, developing a series of community primary care clinics to expand healthcare access for the migrant and uninsured populations in the region. With four sons who loved to ski, we set out on our annual ski-trip to Park Cities, Utah.
On the 1st morning I was “skiing hard” to keep up with my sons as I followed them down the slope one last run before meeting their mom for lunch. Suddenly, I realized I had lost site of the youngest son, so I made an impulsive decision to take a short cut thru some deep un-groomed powder, only to find myself accelerating and losing control of my downhill momentum.
For a split second, I thought I could simply “ride the mountain” until it leveled out. But I was wrong.
I woke up lying on my back encased in snow with severe pain in my neck and head. My right arm, which felt broken, would not move. After taking a few seconds to clear my head, I remembered that I had violently fallen forward, hitting my head after my ski abruptly hit something under the snow. Yeah, I was one of those skiers that got a helicopter ride off the mountain to the University Hospital. Between the pain in my neck and arm and my drifting in and out of consciousness, I only remember thinking “Gee, I must be hurt bad”.
The care I received was excellent. I recovered and gained full function of my right arm, and even rehabbed enough to ski again several years later. But it has been quite the journey. Over the last two decades, I have visited neurologists and neurosurgeons on a consistent basis as new symptoms and complications have regularly disrupted an otherwise healthy life.
I have seen the patient-side of the healthcare system up close. Doing so has fundamentally shifted my perspective of what both patients and physicians go through to optimize health. My experiences have solidified my commitment to work toward making our system of health care better for my physician colleagues and their patients, who like me, just wish for a comprehensive and accurate diagnosis from compassionate physicians and their staff while receiving safe, timely, efficient, effective, equitable and patient-centered health care.