Dr. Walls is the Chief Operating Officer of Mass General Brigham (MGB), an integrated academic health system with $20B in annual revenue, anchored by founding members Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the two largest teaching hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School. MGB also comprises three renowned specialty hospitals; Spaulding Rehab, Mass Eye and Ear, and McLean; seven community hospitals; four neighborhood health centers; and more than two hundred ambulatory care sites. Dr. Walls has led the development of a new management operating system across all inpatient entities to provide collaborative, integrated services, and solutions. Major milestones to date include unifying all digital and information technology services and functions under a single digital leader, unifying radiology, pathology, emergency medicine and anesthesiology into single system-wide services; establishing systemwide operations for pharmacy, security, emergency preparedness, and biomedical engineering, and creating a single, systemwide patient transfer center. Three newly created systemwide institutes – MGB Cancer, MGB Heart and Vascular, and MGB Neurosciences, are optimizing highly integrated and coordinated patient care, education, and research, while improving patient access, capitalizing on resources from across the system.

Previously, Dr. Walls was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an 840-bed academic medical center — a position he held from 2015-2020. During his tenure as COO, Dr. Walls led a major operational and financial turnaround of the hospital, instituted an entirely new management operating system, rebuilt the leadership team, and initiated clinical integration work with Mass General Hospital.

Dr. Walls served as Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital from 1993 through 2014. He also served as Chair of the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization Finance Committee and then its Board.

As an emergency physician, Dr. Walls’s principal contributions are in advancing the techniques and knowledge base related to emergency airway management. Dr. Walls is editor-in-chief of Rosen’s Emergency Medicine, the major textbook in the field, editor-in-chief for emergency medicine for UpToDate and editor emeritus of the Walls Manual of Emergency Airway Management, now in its fifth edition. His research group, the National Emergency Airway Registry, has produced the largest and most comprehensive studies of emergency airway management to date. In all, he has more than 180 scientific publications and has served as visiting professor at more than 40 institutions. Dr. Walls collaborated to create a national resuscitation course focused on emergency airway management, which has trained more than 15,000 emergency physicians and other providers to date. In 2006, he became the first emergency physician to achieve the rank of professor at Harvard Medical School. He has been honored by the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School, major awards from all three emergency medicine specialty organizations, and the Wallace Wilson Leadership Award of the UBC Medical Alumni Association.

Dr. Walls attended medical school at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, and completed his residency training in emergency medicine at Denver General Hospital. He served on the faculty at George Washington University Medical Center and then as Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Vancouver General Hospital and UBC prior to his roles at MGB.