Faculty

Sankey V. Williams, M.D.

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Dr. Williams was a National Merit Scholar at Princeton University and received his M. D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1970. During the next seven years he was in various training programs at the University of Pennsylvania, except for two years in the U.S. Public Health Service with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Upon completion of this training, Dr. Williams began a career at the University of Pennsylvania that continues today. Currently he is Sol Katz Professor of General Internal Medicine with a secondary appointment as Professor of Health Care Systems in the Wharton Business School. He also is Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine. From 1988 to 1996, Dr. Williams was Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Clinical Scholars Program at The University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Williams has published over 60 original articles that describe his work as a health services researcher. This work has concentrated on physicians’ decisions to use clinical resources. His earliest work described interesting decisions regarding the use of diagnostic tests. He has made contributions toward developing new methods for performing decision analyses to understand how physicians make clinical decisions. Also a substantial part of his recent research effort focuses on patient classification systems used by researchers to adjust outcomes for severity of illness. These severity adjustments have a major impact assessing clinical interventions as well as on how third party payors reimburse hospitals. For example, Dr. Williams and his colleagues developed a classification system for rehabilitation patients that is becoming the standard for researchers and has been incorporated into the DRG payment system by Medicare.

As a result of these efforts, Dr. Williams is recognized widely for his research accomplishments. He was Chair of one of four study Sections at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research from 1990-1994. He is a former President of the Society for Medical Decision Making, and he has given invited lectures about Decision Analysis to numerous professional and scientific audiences both here and abroad. In recognition of his expertise with patient case-mix classification systems, he was appointed Commissioner on the U. S. Congress’s Prospective Payment Assessment Commission, which advised Congress about changes in Medicare payments to hospitals. He had had leadership roles in the Society of General Internal Medicine, including Editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine (1995-99) and President of the Society (2000-2001).

Since 2003 Dr. Willams has been an Associate Editor at Annals of Internal Medicine with responsibility for the section "Improving Patient Care," which features papers about quality improvement and patient safety.