Bill has 24 years of experience working in healthcare as a consultant to healthcare providers and government agencies in the areas of patient safety, risk management, quality, evidence-based medicine, and health information technology. He leads HSX’s work as the data aggregator for the Greater Philadelphia Region of CPC+, giving feedback to health systems and providers on their practices’ quality of care using electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) derived from healthcare claims. He maintains strategic partnerships with many HSX stakeholders around initiatives involving chronic health conditions, aging services, and HSX’s contribution to the COVID-19 response.
Prior to joining HSX, Bill directed ECRI Institute PSO, one of the largest patient-safety organizations in the country, aggregating data from 1,800 provider organizations. He has established teams of clinicians, risk managers, analysts, and informaticians in analyzing millions of safety events and producing actionable preventive recommendations on medication safety, healthcare-associated infections, surgical safety, opioid prescribing and administration, and clinical decision support.
As a contractor to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority (PSA), Bill launched PA-PSRS, a statewide safety surveillance and response program, for which PSA won the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety Award from the National Quality Forum and Joint Commission. Bill served as program director for PSA for 16 years, implementing the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations for safety surveillance from To Err Is Human, and helping providers to achieve documented reductions in wrong site surgery, surgical fires, and central line infections. The program’s peer-reviewed journal, the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Advisory, was received by the patient safety officer and CEO of every healthcare facility in Pa., with more than 4,000 additional subscribers in 46 U.S. states/territories and 33 countries. Providers have reported more than 5,000 recommendations implemented since the Advisory’s inception.
Bill has a particular interest in the application of health IT to safety issues and served on the steering committee for ECRI’s Partnership for Health IT Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaborative. He served on the Technical Expert Panel for the National Quality Forum’s project Prioritization and Identification of Health IT Patient Safety Measures, sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). He has lectured on the intersection of safety and health IT for ONC, HIMSS, Modern Healthcare, and the National Patient Safety Foundation.
His articles have appeared in the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Advisory, the Journal of Patient Safety, the Joint Commission Journal of Quality and Patient Safety, Medicare Patient Management, and Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality. In previous positions, he worked on the management teams of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) — now the ECRI Guidelines Trust™ — as well as the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse and the AHRQ-sponsored ECRI Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC).
He earned his bachelor’s degree at Loyola University Maryland, his master’s degree in medical informatics from Northwestern University, and his master’s degree in business administration from West Chester University.