William Martinez, MD, MS

WILLIAM MARTINEZ, MD, MS is Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Medicine and Public Health.   He received his MD degree from the University of California San Francisco and an MS degree from the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health as part of the UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program.  He completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) where he served as a Chief Medical Resident from 2010-11. After residency, Dr. Martinez completed health services research and medical ethics training as a Fellow in General Medicine and Medical Ethics at BWH and Harvard Medical School. He joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2013.

Dr. Martinez conducts foundation and NIH-funded research in the areas of professionalism, patient safety culture, and use of health information technology to improve health care quality. He has been privileged to work with a wonderful group of mentors and colleagues. Dr. Martinez and his colleagues developed and validated two important measures of patient safety culture, the Speaking Up Climate for Professionalism (SUC-Prof) Scale and the Speaking Up Climate for Safety (SUC-Safe) Scale. In addition, he and his colleagues developed and validated the first measure of moral courage among physicians, the Moral Courage Scale for Physicians (MCSP).  Most recently, Dr. Martinez and his colleagues used design sprint methodology to develop My Diabetes Care, a diabetes self-care intervention  embedded within the VUMC patient portal, My Health At Vanderbilt. My Diabetes Care  assists patients with diabetes in understanding and managing their disease. His research has been published in BMJ Quality and Safety,  Academic Medicine, and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.