Charles Telfer Williams, MD "Charlie" (he/him) serves as Vice-Chair for Network Development for the Department of Family Medicine at Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and as Medical Director of the Boston HealthNet (BHN), the network of 12 community health centers affiliated with Boston Medical Center. His main passions at work are quality improvement and leadership development. He increasingly interested in sustainability, in its broadest meaning –considering everything from environmental impact to life-work balance for individuals. He has experience with practice re-design, including implementation of open access, a project redesigning the referrals process at Boston Medical Center (AHRQ 2008) and helping practices at Boston Medical Center achieve NCQA Level 3 PCMH recognition, improving blood pressure control and cancer screening.
As Vice-chair, his primary duties are guiding growth and development of the Family Medicine practices across the BHN network, mentoring faculty, serving as a local resource for quality improvement, managing privileging, and serving as a liaison with the Community Health Center practices. He is also the chair of the Family Medicine compensation committee.
As the Medical Director of BHN, his focus is on improving the quality of care across the entire network which serves approximately 245,000 primary care patients with the goal of optimizing the health in a sustainable way. He has helped to lead practice transformation of the Patient Centered Medical Home efforts at BMC and in the CHCs through the state’s Primary Care Payment Reform Initiative. He is continuing this work with BMC's in Medicaid ACO development focusing on clinical systems.
His teaching interests include quality improvement, practice management, electronic health records, evidence-based medicine, leadership development, bioethics and interviewing skills. Since 2001 He has overseen quality improvement for the Family Medicine department at BMC while serving as Medical Director for the hospital based practice. In 2003 he became the founding Medical Director of the East Boston Community Health Center Family Medicine Department. He was a leader in the clinical implementation of different Electronic Health Records in both practices. A graduate of University of Wisconsin - Madison (B.S. - Bioethics 1990, M.D. 1994) and the Brown Practice Medicine residency program, he also has research experience in Medical Ethics. He is a member of the American Board Family Practice, the American Academy of Family Physicians, Massachusetts Academy of Family Physicians, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
At BMC, he serves as chair of the Professional Practice Evaluation committee and on the BMC credentials committee.
Outside of work, he plays the French horn with the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra and stays in shape by playing squash and ultimate frisbee, dancing whenever possible, and coaching soccer.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Activities: Dec 2023
Coming from an upper middle class background, I am grateful for and intentional about using my privilege to help others. My entire career has been working in community health centers (CHCs) to improve access, decrease health disparities, and promote health equity.
As Medical Director for Boston HealthNet (BHN), a focus of my work is to advance health equity – currently, emphasizing social influences on health and disease metrics. BHN supports the work and mission of CHCs, which is to provide care for vulnerable, underserved, less privileged people to improve health. BHN helps them by improving access and referrals systems, honing clinic operations, advocating for needed care in our health systems, supporting research to promote health equity, supporting training systems dedicated to a diverse highly-skilled workforce.
One of my roles in Department of Family Medicine is leading the Grand Rounds Committee. To support of primary mission to provide medical education that equips participants to provide the highest level of care to improve health equity, we are intentionally diversifying of our speakers and highlighting health equity data and patient oriented outcomes in our presentations.
My Mid-Career Faculty Leadership (MFL) development program project is about accessibility and I am working with a diverse team to understand better this issue.
In my roles as a DFM vice chair and BHN director, I mentor a number of female physician leaders and work hard to encourage them to lean in to the work and push against societally imposed roles that are in their own minds or the institution.
Guiding all of my work as a leader and citizen of the world is attention to the structural impacts of resource use as an equity issue. I work to diminish resource use in healthcare, whose increasingly profit driven nature of which creates health disparities and to fight against climate change which I feel is fast becoming the largest driver of social inequities in the world.
As a family physician committed to health equity and improving the health outcomes of those less fortunate than I have been, I try to be mindful of what I have received and how I can use that to improve the health of my patients and the population. I work to be open to feedback and actively look to others to help me see what I might not see on my own. I am enjoying and growing on this ongoing journey.
Publications listed below are automatically derived from MEDLINE/PubMed and other
sources, which might result in incorrect or missing publications. Faculty can
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Mitchell SE, Bickmore T, Paasche-Orlow M, Williams C, Forsythe S, Atrash H, Johnson K, Jack BW. Increasing access to preconception care using health information technology. Sociedad Iberoamericana de Información Científica, www.siicsalud.com /des /expertocompleto.php/. 2010; 108140.
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Williams CT, Fost N. Lancet. Doctor’s experience and traumatic lumbar punctures (letter). 1994; 344(8929):1086-7.
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Williams CT, Fost N. Ethical considerations surrounding first time procedures: a study and analysis of patients attitudes toward spinal taps by students. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. 1992; 2(3):217-321.
This graph shows the total number of publications by year, by first, middle/unknown,
or last author.
Year | Publications |
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1992 | 1 |
1994 | 1 |
2010 | 1 |
2012 | 1 |
2022 | 1 |
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