Dr. Kayode Williams is an Associate Professor and serves as the Vice Chair for System Integration, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and Medical Director Practice Innovations Office of Johns Hopkins Physicians. Our Department has grown to encompass a number of sites both inpatient and outpatient: JHH, Bayview, Howard County General Hospital, pain services at Kennedy Krieger and in September, acute and chronic pain care at Sibley Memorial Hospital. Our shared vision is to be a metric-driven Department across all Johns Hopkins sites where we provide care. We would like to share success with the GE capacity optimization initiatives, our Center for Perioperative Optimization, patient access and throughput as well as work with quality metrics via our participation in AQI. These efforts will better coordinate care and enhance the safety of our care delivery. In his role as Vice Chair for System Integration he facilitates faculty-led development of novel population health-based, coordinated and integrated care delivery models. Two of such programs include the Peri-Operative Pain Program (led by Dr. Marie Hanna) and the Center for Peripartum Optimization for High Risk Obstetrics (led by Dr. Jamie Murphy).

Dr. Williams completed his clinical training in anesthesiology and pain medicine at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos in Nigeria, the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and at the University of Michigan. In 2004, he completed a Master of Business Administration at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Dr. Williams was a member of the University Of Michigan Department Of Anesthesiology, division of Pain Medicine and a faculty on the Liver Transplant team from 2002-2005. In 2005, he joined Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine as a member of the division of Pain Medicine.

Clinically, Dr. Williams sees a general population of patients with chronic pain, but primarily those with spine pain, neuropathic pain, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), and nerve injury pain. He also treats patients with pain from rheumatologic conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and ankylosing spondylitis (an inflammatory disease of the spine), who are no longer responding to medication. His primary area of interest is spinal cord stimulation (SCS). SCS delivers pulses of electricity to the spinal cord to change the electrical messages that pain nerves carry to the brain. It is used to address nerve pain from a variety of different causes in the trunk and extremities. SCS is highly effective in a select population of patients, but its exact mechanism of action is still under investigation.

In his research, Dr. Williams studies SCS with the two-fold goal of understanding how the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system change as a result of disease, injury, and nerve damage and finding ways to use devices such as the SCS to return patients to normal function with minimal use of medications. One new area of research that Dr. Williams hopes to explore is whether SCS can be used for pain that is not neuronal in origin. In particular, he plans to collaborate with colleagues in Gastroenterology to evaluate novel approaches in which SCS can be used to treat chronic abdominal pain from conditions such as chronic pancreatitis, abdominal scar tissue, and inflammatory bowel disease. He is also looking at different ways of delivering the electrical pulses to improve the response and permit its use in more patients.

In another avenue of research, Dr. Williams is working to increase the efficiency of academic healthcare practices. Academic centers are being asked to see more patients, deliver more cost-effective care, and continue to train the best future providers. He is developing business operation processes and tools that he believes will increase efficiency while improving the quality of care, enhancing the patient experience, and augmenting physician training.

In 2009, Dr. Williams and the operations faculty at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School established a partnership with the goal of enhancing patient throughput while maintaining high-quality resident and fellow education. In collaboration with Carey Business School, Dr. Williams developed a simulation model to identify and implement service delivery improvements at the Blaustein Pain Center, and a software driven tool to streamline resident clinical education. In 2011, he became an adjunct faculty member at Carey Business School where he co-instructs the Managing Healthcare Processes course. As a part of this course, second year MBA students consult for various hospital departments to help solve operational problems that department administrators have identified. This hands-on, real-world healthcare course is highly subscribed within the business school.

Dr. Williams currently serves on the Howard County General Hospital Board of Trustees, Director-at-Large for the American Academy of Pain Medicine, Co-Section Editor for Pain Medicine Journal, and ad-hoc reviewer for the NIH Somatosensory and Pain Systems Study Section. Dr. Williams is an alumni of the Advance Leadership Training Program for operations, quality and safety at the world-renowned Intermountain Healthcare Leadership Training Institute. This training has helped prepare Dr. Williams for involvement in increasingly complex operations initiatives.