Mark V. Williams, MD, MHM, FACP

Mark V. Williams, MD, FACP, MHM is Chief Transformation & Learning Officer for the UK HealthCare system and serves as Director of the Center for Health Services Research and Professor and Vice-Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Kentucky. Williams graduated from Emory University School of Medicine and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He also completed a Faculty Development Fellowship in General Medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the Woodruff Leadership Academy at Emory, the Program in Palliative Care Education and Practice at Harvard, and the Advance Training Program in Health Care Delivery Improvement sponsored by Intermountain Healthcare's Institute for Health Care Delivery Research.

Williams established the first hospitalist program at a public hospital in 1998, and built two of the largest academic hospitalist programs in the U.S. at Emory (1998-2007) and Northwestern (2007-2013) Universities. Currently, he is Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at UK HealthCare and has doubled the faculty since 2014.

A Past President of the Society of Hospital Medicine and the Founding Editor of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, he actively promotes the role of hospitalists as leaders in delivery of health care to hospitalized patients. He has been quoted in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports.

Notably, he also serves as Principal Investigator for SHM’s Project BOOST (Better Outcomes by Optimizing Safe Transitions). Grant funding from The John A. Hartford Foundation, BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois and other foundations, supported dissemination of Project BOOST to nearly 200 hospitals across the U.S.

In 2015, he became the principal investigator on Project ACHIEVE (Achieving Patient-Centered Care and Optimized Health In Care Transitions by Evaluating the Value of Evidence), funded with a $15 million contract from PCORI. With more than 120 peer-reviewed publications including in journals such as JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine, Williams’ research focuses on quality improvement, care transitions, teamwork and the role of health literacy in the delivery of health care.

Faculty Rank

Quality Improvement, Teamwork, Care Transitions.