Karl Y Bilimoria

Dr. Bilimoria is a surgical oncologist and a health services researcher focused on quality improvement, implementation science, and health policy. He is a Vice President for Quality for the Northwestern Medicine health system. He is also the Vice Chair for Quality in the Department of Surgery and the John B. Murphy Professor of Surgery. His clinical practice is focused on melanoma and sarcoma. Dr. Bilimoria is the Director of the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center of Northwestern University (SOQIC), a center of 35 faculty and staff focused on national, regional, and local quality improvement research and practical initiatives. He is the Director of the 56-hospital Illinois Surgical Quality Improvement Collaborative (ISQIC) and Principal Investigator of the 151-hospital FIRST Trial. He is a Faculty Scholar at the American College of Surgeons. Dr. Bilimoria is the President of the Association for Academic Surgery. Dr. Bilimoria’s research agenda focuses on improving healthcare quality and delivery by (1) developing better ways to provide hospitals with comparative data, (2) providing hospitals with the tools to use their data to undertake internal hospital quality improvement efforts, (3) providing patients with better comparative data through public reporting which can assist them in selecting the best hospitals and physicians for their care, and (4) performing evaluations of policies that impact healthcare quality. Across Northwestern’s seven hospitals, he has integrated research and innovation into the quality improvement enterprise in order to move toward a true learning healthcare system. He has published more than 300 scientific articles, including numerous publications in JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Bilimoria’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Health Care Services Corporation, and numerous others, totaling over $30,000,000. He was recently listed by Becker’s as one of the “Top 50 Experts Leading the Field of Patient Safety” in the U.S.