Vice President, Physician Services & Clinical Integration
Lawrence Ward, MD, MPH, FACP, is vice president, Physician Services and Clinical Integration. He is an innovative medical executive with extensive experience both clinically and administratively. In his role, he leads the Bayhealth Medical Group and Population Health team for the health system, focusing on growing the clinical enterprise while developing best clinical practices and innovative practice designs.
Leading efforts to advance quality improvement, population health, and pay for performance, Dr. Ward also contributes his expertise to several other initiatives at the health system. Initiatives including Access to Care, Integrated Behavioral Health, Patient Safety, Reducing Racial Disparities in Healthcare, and Social Determinants of Health all benefit from his guidance.
Dr. Ward brings a wealth of healthcare leadership to his role at Bayhealth. Before joining the health system in 2021, he most recently served as a professor of medicine and population health and the executive vice chairman of the department of Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. Previous to this experience, he held clinical, educational, and administrative leadership positions at the Delaware Valley Accountable Care Organization, Temple University - Lewis Katz School of Medicine, and the University of Pennsylvania.
He is a fellow of the Delaware and Pennsylvania chapters of the American College of Physicians (ACP) and previously served as the governor for the Pennsylvania ACP Southeastern Chapter. In addition, Dr. Ward has published many peer-reviewed scholarly articles and two book chapters. He has also been an invited speaker at many grand rounds, as well as regional and national conferences held by the National Association of ACOs (NAACOS) and the American College of Physicians, among others.
Licensed as a physician in both Delaware and Pennsylvania, Dr. Ward is board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine. He earned his BS in biology at Emory University, and his MPH at The George Washington University. He completed his MD at Jefferson Medical College (now Sidney Kimmel Medical College) at Thomas Jefferson University and his internship and residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Ward’s greatest joy in working at Bayhealth is the opportunity to help expand patient access to outstanding medical care, even if patients live far from a city. In his spare time, he enjoys travel, movie trivia, hiking, camping, and genealogy, through which he has tracked his family's origins back to the 1400s.
Reach out to Dr. Ward via LinkedIn.