William E. Golden, M.D. is Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences where he served as director of the division of general internal medicine for nearly 20 years. He is currently the Medical Director, Arkansas Medicaid and is the lead clinician for the program's Payment Improvement Initiative which has received a $42 million CMS payment reform testing grant from CMMI. In this role, he has shaped the design and implementation of over a dozen clinical episodes and a statewide Patient Centered Medical Home program. He is also directs Arkansas Medicaid's hospital pay for performance program which reduced early elective deliveries over 90%. Previously, he served for 16 years as Vice President for Clinical Quality Improvement of the Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care for which he has designed numerous statewide quality improvement for Medicare and Medicaid. He is currently a member of the NQF Appeals Committee and co-chair of its new Medicaid Measures Accelerator Initiative. As a member of the HCP-LAN Guiding Committee, he recently co-chaired a workgroup that in 2017 released a white paper recommending a framework for alternative payment mechanisms for primary care. 

A past Chair the Board of Regents of the American College of Physicians, Dr. Golden served on the Board of Directors of the National Quality Forum from 2001-2004 and was President of the American Health Quality Association from 1997-2000. He has been a methodologist member of the AMA Physician Consortium for Performance Measurement for over a decade. Among his awards and recognitions, he received the national James Q. Cannon award for physician leadership in clinical quality improvement (2001), Mastership in the American College of Physicians (2008), the Alfred Stengel Memorial Award for service to the American College of Physicians (2011), and UAMS Public Health School Award for Leadership in Public Health (2014).