Karin Porter-Williamson, M.D.
Associate Professor
Division Director of Palliative Medicine
University of Kansas Medical Center
Dr. Porter-Williamson is an Associate Professor and Division Director of Palliative Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She is the Medical Director for Palliative Care Services at the University of Kansas Hospital, and is the Medical Director for the KS-MO TPOPP Coalition. Dr. Porter-Williamson completed Internal Medicine Training at the University of Kansas Medical Center in 2002, and then completed fellowship training in Hospice and Palliative medicine in 2003 at San Diego Hospice. After training she returned to the University of Kansas and has been in her role there for the past 12 years.
Dr. Porter-Williamson’s academic interests include building systems around patient centered, goal directed plans of care, to improve the value of medical care for patients and families facing serious illness, and to integrate the principles of Palliative Medicine as the standard of care for all seriously ill patients and families. Dr. Porter-Williamson’s educational focus is on the training of med students, residents, fellows, and inter-professional teams to understand these principles and integrate them into their practice as high quality, patient centered providers. The Palliative Care Program at KU Hospital has grown to serve approximately 1500 new inpatients annually, as well as approximately 1200 outpatient encounters in Cancer Center and Cardiology program sites. Such program maturation demands new strategies to continue to push the system's evolution in meeting the needs of its seriously ill population, including reinvestment in Primary Palliative Care education and delivery, as the specialist group workload becomes saturated. Dr. Porter-Williamsons work with her team partners in the system's ELNEC training program is one example of this work. In the past few years Dr. Porter-Williamson has also worked closely with the Center for Practical Bioethics to foster the development of TPOPP (Transportable Physicians Orders for Patient Preferences, a POLST paradigm), which is implementing across the states of Kansas and Missouri. This effort, as part of the national POLST coalition, is a major step forward in the translation of meaningful advance care planning into orders respected across the continuum of care, in hospitals, long term care communities, and with EMS as people with serious illness move across the system.