To Navy Capt. (Dr.) Carlos Williams, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence is a gem of the Military Health System, where victims of traumatic brain injury come for care that is intensive, interdisciplinary, holistic and family-based.
Williams has been the director of NICoE at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, since October. Before that he was special advisor and director of the Office of Global Health Engagement for the Navy, and he is the immediate past regional health affairs attaché to the Pacific Islands.
He received his medical degree from Morehouse School of Medicine and completed his internship and residencies in internal medicine and pediatrics at Wayne State University in Detroit. Williams holds an appointment as assistant professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and adjunct professor at Morehouse.
Just a few months into his new duty station, Williams already takes a great deal of pride in what NICoE has done, and where it's going.
"It really stands at a unique crossroads," Williams said. "In 2010 (when NICoE was founded), we were in the midst of the wars, and TBI was front and center. The challenge with it today is that TBI is still important because these injuries and these wounds, they don't go away just because the fighting stops. They are lifetime chronic diseases that you deal with."
Since that founding, 10 other centers across the country - the Intrepid Spirit Center Network, or ISCs - have been stood up to support the work of NICoE. Williams' vast experience with global health programs will come in handy as he assesses what comes next for NICoE and the ISCs.
Williams also earned his MBA from Johns Hopkins University, so the business of medicine is not foreign to him, particularly with the Defense Health Agency and the Military Health System. He knows how health care works, having spent two years on Capitol Hill working for the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Foundation. He was selected as an inaugural U.S. Presidential Leadership Scholar in 2015. He's done interagency, international, and public-private partnership work. The Georgia native has been around.
"The first thing we did was a stakeholder analysis, just to look at all our strengths and weaknesses," Williams said. "We want to focus on really maturing and establishing a firm network across the board. That means the NICoE and ISC network, we want that to be a true entity with a value proposition ... with academia, with industry, with interagency, and with other DOD partners. But our primary role is to support our active duty members."
He plans to do that by increasing NICoE's research capabilities and launching a program called TRIP (Translating Research Into Practice) with "clinically relevant activities." The goal is to take NICoE's decade of research and translate it into better care, he said, including standardization and expansion of outpatient services as well as intensive care offerings.
"We want to make sure that we show the value that these centers provide and how they're productive and what it takes to run them," Williams said. "This is an interdisciplinary model. We are discussing these patients individually, and one aspect affects another. It's a unique model for caring for patients. We want to improve patient outcomes and show how this model does that."
Other bullet list items are education, training, and outreach, including more interaction with the media and educating the public through tools like webinars. "One of my big initiatives for this year is really getting beyond the walls of Walter Reed," he said. "I'm excited. It's going to be a big year."