Team Member Hospital: MUSC

Dr. Williams serves as Executive Director of Grants and Research, where he leads strategic partnerships, grant development, and administrative operations. He serves on the leadership team of the National Telehealth Center of Excellence (COE), overseeing the administrative team and serving as a primary liaison to HRSA and other national partners. Additionally, Dr. Williams oversees the Center for Telehealth’s data and outcomes infrastructure, working closely with the bioinformatics, analytics, and quality departments.

Prior to joining the Center for Telehealth, Edrin served as Chief Development Officer for Leadership Council for Healthy Communities (LCHC) and Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University in Washington, DC. Dr. Williams holds a Master of Health Services Administration from Mississippi College and a Doctor of Health Administration from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

Dr. Ford is a Professor of Medicine; the Division Chief of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep, and Allergy Medicine; and the Medical Director of the Tele-ICU and ICU Innovations Critical Care Outreach Program at MUSC. As Project Director, Dr. Ford oversees technical, administrative, and financial aspects at all levels of the Telehealth Center for Excellence. She contributes in a coordinated fashion to all teams and uses her skills in quality improvement, health services research, health disparities, and implementation science to jointly lead the cross-cutting team responsible for evaluation and resource center collaboration. Dr. Ford is facile with team science and, over the past 10 years, has served as both PI and collaborator with the COE multi-disciplinary research team including the tele-ICU and ICU-Innovations programs. She has a history of leading successful projects funded through the NIH and Department of Defense, among others. In addition, Dr. Ford has contributed at a national level to telehealth literature through a series of peer-reviewed publications and presentations. At local and state levels she has been singled out as a leader in the field as a member of the MUSC 2010-2015 Strategic Planning Group, Technology/Innovation, and Chair of the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Institute Planning Committee for Scientific Retreat on Telemedicine.

 

 

Dr. King is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and the Chief Medical Information Officer at MUSC. Previously serving as the Associate Executive Medical Director of the Center for Telehealth, she lends her public health training and practical experience implementing a rapidly expanding telehealth program to all teams, co-leads the cross-cutting team, oversees day-to-day activities, and assists Dr. Ford in coordinating their efforts to meet the mission of the Telehealth Center of Excellence. Dr. King led the growth of the school-based telehealth program from 13 schools to over 80 and was responsible for ensuring that this growth was systematically directed at medically underserved areas of the state with a large chronic disease burden. She has done this by applying her skills in precision public health methods and unifying teams at historically competing health systems, the Department of Education, FQHCs, private practices, school districts, and non-profits to bring care to children in the most rural areas of the state. She has solidified these alliances by founding the South Carolina School-Based Health Collaborative and the SCTA School-based Telehealth Workgroup. She has contributed to state legislation as a content expert and worked alongside the SC Medical Board to implement safe protocols for prescribing controlled substances via telehealth. Dr. King is recognized as a national leader in telehealth contributing to the Pediatric Academic Society Committee as the representative from the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Telehealth Care.

Dr. McElligott is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Executive Medical Director of the Center for Telehealth, as well as the Co-Chair of the South Carolina Telehealth Alliance (SCTA). He contributes his expertise in strategically planning and implementing telehealth programs to each team and leads the "Optimizing and Evaluating Health System Parameters for Ambulatory Telehealth" sub-project. As PI and collaborator on both private and federal grants, he established new telehealth programs and solidified and united existing ones. Through this work, Dr. McElligott has gained the support of the state legislature securing over 100 million dollars of funding for telehealth. He founded the SCTA and has led the strategic planning process to equitably distribute these funds and concurrently ensured responsible financial oversight. He is responsible for the significant advancements in telehealth adoption across SC through his work collaborating with the State Legislature, Department of Mental Health, Department of Health and Human Services, the Board of Medical Examiners, payers, providers, and nonprofit organizations. Dr. McElligott has recently been recognized for his work leveraging telehealth to improve the health of South Carolinians with the 2020 South Carolina State Champion Award for Telehealth, MUSC’s 2020 Physician of the Year Award, the 2020 MUSC Innovator Award, and the 2020 Margaret Jenkins Pediatric Teaching Award. Dr. McElligott serves on numerous regional and national advisory committees and has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of telehealth.

Mrs. Warr is the Administrator for the Center for Telehealth. As one of the foundational team members, she built an innovative, outreach tele-ICU consortium program, which has grown under her leadership to 10 hospitals of rurality. She now manages several programs she developed, including a continuous virtual monitoring program for healthcare worker exposure reduction; four telehealth quality domains and associated metrics for evaluation of service quality; and a risk-stratified, technology-enabled COVID-19 remote patient monitoring program.

Mrs. Verdin is the Manager of the National Telehealth Center of Excellence (COE) at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Rebecca has been with the Center for Telehealth since 2015 upon graduating from Clemson University with a Bachelor of Science in Management, and in 2019, she earned her Master of Health Administration from MUSC. In her current role, Mrs. Verdin works closely with directors of the Telehealth Center of Excellence, Director of Grants and Research, telehealth grants team, and the core COE research teams to successfully carryout the research and program agenda of the COE. She assists with all research, regulatory, budgeting, and reporting aspects of the grant and supports the research project teams in meeting their annual workplan deliverables. During her first five years with the Center for Telehealth, Rebecca served on the Tele-ICU and ICU Innovations teams, as well as on the service development team as a Telehealth Service Coordinator. In these roles, she became an expert in program coordinator and in successful telehealth implementation and service delivery.

Ms. D’Orio performs coordination duties in support of the COE activities and programs.