It is my pleasure to announce that Mark V. Williams, MD, FACP, MHM, will be joining Washington University School of Medicine in the Department of Medicine as the new Chief for the Division of Hospital Medicine. Dr. Williams is being recruited from the University of Kentucky, where he is currently the Chief Quality and Transformation Officer at UK HealthCare and the Director for the Center for Health Services Research.
Dr. Williams did his undergraduate training at the University of Florida, where he graduated summa cum laude and received his medical degree at Emory University, also graduating summa cum laude. He did his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, followed by a General Medicine Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received additional training from the Woodruff Leadership Academy and the Harvard Palliative Care Education Program and advanced training in quality improvement from the University of Utah Intermountain Healthcare System. He is certified in Lean performance improvement and Six Sigma DMAIC Project Leadership.
After finishing his training, Dr. Williams joined the faculty at Emory University and Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1998, he established the first hospitalist program at a public hospital in the U.S., and the Emory Hospital Medicine Unit (EHMU) in 1999, which established hospitalist programs at multiple community hospitals affiliated with Emory Healthcare. EHMU expanded to include Emory University Hospital and Emory’s Midtown community hospital growing to > 60 hospitalists, becoming at the time the largest academic hospital medicine program in the U.S. In 2007, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Memorial Hospital recruited him to establish their Division of Hospital Medicine and serve as Professor and Chief. In 2014, he was recruited to the University of Kentucky (UK) to serve as Professor and Director of the Center for Health Services Research (CHSR), and serve as the inaugural Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at UK HealthCare and Vice Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. For the past three years, he focused his efforts on the role of Chief Quality and Transformation Officer and directing the CHSR.
Dr. Williams has extensive experience with building and growing hospital medicine programs and focused on providing outstanding clinical care, prioritizing evidence-based medicine and education, undertaking quality improvement and advancing scholarship. At Emory, Northwestern and the University of Kentucky he facilitated significant growth in hospital medicine clinical operations, performance improvement, research, scholarship and the teaching missions at all three institutions.
Dr. Williams’ scholarly and research interests are focused on health literacy, performance improvement, health services delivery, teamwork and implementation science. His career efforts have yielded > 170 peer-reviewed articles and > $34 million in grants and contracts as PI or Co-PI. Most recently, he received funding from: CMS (PI) for the Kentucky Consortium for Accountable Health Communities to screen beneficiaries for health-related social needs and navigate high risk patients to community resources, PCORI (PI) for Project ACHIEVE – Achieving Patient-Centered Care and Optimized Health In Care Transitions by Evaluating the Value of Evidence, NHLBI (multi-PI) to collaboratively develop a multicomponent, multilevel implementation strategy for syncope optimal care through engagement (Project MISSION), and AHRQ as a co-investigator on the MARQUIS 2 project which succeeded in implementation of a medication reconciliation toolkit at 18 hospitals to improve safety.
Dr. Williams is an active clinician and has practiced as a hospitalist in multiple settings in Georgia, Illinois and Kentucky, in large academic settings and community hospitals. He has also been actively engaged in medical student and resident teaching. During his career, he served in a number of national leadership roles including: President of the Society of Hospital Medicine, Founding Editor of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, advisory panel member for AHRQ’s Patient Safety Network, and on the University Health Consortium (UHC) Hospital Engagement Network Partnership for Patients Advisory Committee. He also served on the National Quality Forum’s Steering Committee for the Readmissions Project and as a member of the American College of Surgeons’ Quality Measure Development Panel for postoperative readmissions.
Dr. Williams is well recognized for his ability to translate scholarly work, innovation and research into practice improvement, focusing on developing new systems of healthcare delivery that are patient-centered, cost effective and provide outstanding value. Nationally recognized as a leader in hospital medicine, performance improvement and safety and quality of healthcare delivery, Dr. Williams brings extraordinary expertise to our Division of Hospital Medicine and will continue to advance the division’s clinical excellence and innovation in safety and quality. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Mark Williams, who will be joining Washington University School of Medicine on October 1, 2021.
I would also like to take this time to give my greatest thanks to Dr. Michael Lin who has admirably led the division as the interim Division Chief since Dr. Mark Thoelke stepped down in January of 2020. We have had an extraordinary series of leaders in the Division of Hospital Medicine here, beginning with Dr. Mark Thoelke and then with Dr. Michael Lin. Mike has been an exceptional leader through very challenging times with COVID. He is a front-line leader who led by example with grace, humility and courage. He has done an outstanding job building the faculty development programs, enhancing educational programs and recruiting exceptional physicians to join the division. Throughout COVID, Mike was always front and center, leading his faculty and providing new approaches to ensure that the safety of his faculty and patients were paramount. He also worked diligently to ensure that the faculty had access to cutting-edge information to care for COVID patients and also to run the non-COVID hospitalist service at the same time. We are immensely grateful for his leadership and know that Dr. Lin will continue to be an outstanding leader and work closely with Dr. Mark Williams in the future.