Ruth Williams-Brinkley

Ruth Williams-Brinkley

Regional President, Mid-atlantic States, Kaiser Permanente

A trained nurse and veteran health care executive, Ruth Williams-Brinkley is regional president for the mid-Atlantic States for Kaiser Permanente, which operates 38 medical office buildings in Maryland, Virginia and Washington and has some 825,000 members.

Williams-Brinkley joined Kaiser Permanente in November 2017 as president of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals of the Northwest. In that role, she oversaw the organization’s health care delivery and health plan operations in Oregon and nearby areas.

Before that she served as CEO of KentuckyOne Health, that state’s largest integrated health system, and previously as president and CEO of Carondelet Health Network in Tucson, Arizona.

Williams-Brinkley serves on the boards of several institutions, including that of Travere Therapeutics, DePaul University, the University of Phoenix and the Clinical Center Research Hospital Board of the National Institutes of Health.

She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science from De Paul University and an honorary doctorate from Spaulding University, in Louisville, Kentucky.

Williams-Brinkley told The Daily Record she is a supporter of mentorship opportunities for young and developing leaders – especially those from underrepresented backgrounds.

She also said that her grandmother was her very first mentor and taught her never to shy away from new opportunities. That advice, she said, has served her well when she was offered new positions or responsibilities about which she was uncertain or that involved uprooting her family.

This profile is part of The Daily Record's Health Care Power List for 2023. Information used in this profile was sourced from the honoree. See the full list at thedailyrecord.com.