Dr. Payton is Medical Director of the Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), Director of Quality and Safety for Guerin Children’s, and Co-Director of Collaborative Quality Improvement for the California Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative (CPQCC).
Dr. Payton completed his pediatric residency, chief residency, and fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He joined the Cedars-Sinai Division of Neonatology in 2009, became Associate Medical Director of the NICU in 2010, Medical Director in 2022, and Director of Quality and Safety for Guerin Children’s in 2025. He completed the Medical Education Fellowship program at David Geffen School of Medicine in 2016. He received the Learning Tree Endowment Award in 2017 for excellence and innovation in medical education.
Dr. Payton’s academic and research interests focus on innovative approaches to collaborative quality improvement and methods that accelerate change across healthcare systems. His work with CPQCC began through its Perinatal Research Committee, which he later chaired and transformed from a reporting-focused group into a forum for generating research ideas, developing collaborations, and recruiting expertise to advance quality improvement research.
Since 2019, Dr. Payton has served as Co-Director of Collaborative Quality Improvement for CPQCC, leading statewide multicenter initiatives across California. He directed CPQCC’s first antibiotic stewardship collaborative involving 28 NICUs and its very low birth weight growth collaborative involving 22 NICUs. He also served as Co-Investigator and Medical Quality Improvement Lead for Optimizing Antibiotic Stewardship in California NICUs (OASCN), a federally funded, 30-NICU multicenter collaborative.
Dr. Payton has developed and adapted quality improvement methods to broaden participation, accelerate shared learning, develop more effective statistical process control strategies, leverage practice variation as a driver of improvement, and increase the impact of statewide collaboratives. He introduced A3 methodology and vignette-based research methods into CPQCC’s collaborative improvement model, establishing vignette methodology as a standard tool for California NICU quality improvement collaboratives. He is a past recipient of the David Wirtschafter Award for his quality improvement leadership and contributions to improving neonatal outcomes across California. Dr. Payton is a physician-artist and explores integrating art and design thinking into quality improvement, safety methods, and systems-thinking.