As a medical school student at the State University of New York in the late 1990s, Laura Herrera Scott would frequently pass homeless individuals and crack vials between her subway stop and classes. Unable to turn a blind eye, she and some fellow students started a volunteer-run health care clinic to benefit the homeless. It was originally referred to as a foot clinic, Herrera Scott says, because so many of the patients complained that their feet hurt or they didn’t have the right shoes.

“I have always has seen myself as a public health policy person,” says Herrera Scott, which is one reason she was intrigued when Johns Hopkins HealthCare began accepting applications for the newly created position of medical director of population health and community health programs. A former deputy secretary of public health services for the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, she was selected for the role and launched into it on July 6.

Herrera Scott, who says she was drawn to the position because of Johns Hopkins’ innovation in population health, will provide physician leadership in designing, developing, implementing, executing and evaluating the population health care management programs of the organization and the Johns Hopkins Medicine Office of Managed Care and Population Health. To do that, Herrera Scott says, she is focusing on ways to better integrate care delivery, engage the local communities, and support the quality improvement and transformation work of both the Johns Hopkins health plans and delivery system.

She also will work with other Johns Hopkins HealthCare medical directors on clinical resource utilization strategies and will assist the provider relations department in strategies to engage providers in innovative, data-driven quality improvement and accountable care models.

Herrera Scott is well-prepared to manage these wide-ranging responsibilities, having previously held leadership positions in the Veterans Health Administration and with the Baltimore City Health Department. Early in her career, she served as a clinical associate at The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s HIV/AIDS Moore Clinic.

Herrera Scott holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from The City University of New York’s Baruch College, a medical degree from the SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn and a master’s degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed her internship and residency in family medicine at the University of Maryland. Herrera Scott is a former major in the medical corps of the U.S. Army Reserves and served in two stateside deployments and briefly in Iraq. She also has volunteered for medical missions to Costa Rica, Haiti and, through the Indian Health Service, to Alaska and Arizona.