A global health care thought leader, David was born in Lexington, Kentucky and is a citizen of Ireland through his maternal grandfather. A board-certified internist, he trained at Mayo Clinic after degrees in economics, epidemiology, medicine, and business at UNC, where he was a Morehead Scholar and North Carolina Fellow and inductee into Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Gamma Sigma. David received the Distinguished Alumnus Awards of UNC’s School of Medicine in 2008 and UNC’s School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology in 2019, is Adjunct Professor of Health Policy and Management at UNC and a member of the UNC Chancellor’s Global Leadership Council. David was Associate Professor at Mayo, Associate Professor with tenure at University of Virginia and Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine with tenure at Emory University.

David joined Baylor Health Care System (BHCS) in 1999 in Dallas, Texas as its first Chief Quality Officer (CQO) and, upon the merger of BHCS and Scott & White Health, became CQO of Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH), Texas’s largest health care system with > 1000 clinical care sites, > 100 joint ventures and annual operating budget > $10 billion. He served on the Board of Managers of The Heart Hospital Baylor Plano, the BSWH-Kessler/Select rehabilitation and long-term care board, the High Value Health Care Collaborative board and the xG Health Advisory Board of Geisinger Health System. Awards under David’s leadership included the 2007 Leapfrog Patient-Centered Care Award and the 2008 National Quality Award of the National Quality Forum. He founded in 2012 BSWH’s Value-Based Healthcare Global Institute, providing performance improvement solutions globally.

Ballard retired from BSWH to join Mentice AB in January 2019 as EVP/Chief Clinical Officer and President, Mentice Inc., to partner with health care systems to improve safety and efficiency through endovascular simulation performance solutions. In August 2019 he was elected to the Mentice AB board and in September 2019 to the board of AlertMD, an innovative mobile health platform powered by artificial intelligence, which was acquired in 2020 by EverCommerce, a multi-vertical portfolio of management software solutions. Ballard serves a board member for Pascal Metrics, the world’s leader in health care harm measurement and related solutions to advance patient safety, is a board member for Sniffle Health, a telehealth platform solutions company, and a Scientific Advisory Board member for InSyncDx Solutions, Inc., which reduces unwanted care variation in laboratory testing. In 2020, he co-founded Concentric Health Alliance, which is dedicated to the provision of safe, timely and high value Personal Protective Equipment and other relevant medical supplies for health care systems and other organizations. In 2022 David was appointed as Chief Clinical Officer for Buffkin / Baker, an executive search firm, that was co-founded by fellow Tar Heel MBA, Craig Buffkin. 

David’s wife, Michela Caruso, M.D., a graduate with Honors of Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, is a Mayo Clinic-trained radiation oncologist and partner with Texas Oncology, the world’s largest independent oncology group with more than 530 physician partners and more than 280 cancer treatment centers. Their dual citizen bilingual children are Elisa, a BA and an MBA graduate of the University of Denver where she was a University Academic Scholar and Cherrington Global Scholar, who is Vice President for Operations for Volio Imports, a wine and spirits international importation company based in Denver and Alessandro, a graduate in molecular biology and Italian of the University of Denver where he was also a Cherrington Global Scholar and an MBA graduate of SMU where he was a Cox Scholar and Information Technology Operations Management Distinguished Scholar, who is Principal, Corporate Development and Strategy for WCG, a family of 30 companies improving the quality and efficiency of clinical research, following a similar role with Press Ganey.

David and Michela are Mayo Laureates and Morehead-Cain Scholarship Fund donors. They have endowed a scholarship in honor of David’s mentors, Edward H. Wagner and Kerr L. White, for dual degree students in the UNC Schools of Medicine and Public Health. David

and Michela are also endowment funders of the oldest student-run health care safety net, the UNC Student Health Action Coalition Clinic, which David directed in 1980. David and his family live in Dallas, Keystone (Colorado), his wife’s hometown of Rome and on a small farm in Tobia, Viterbo, Lazio, Italy, where they have fruit, nut and olive orchards and produce Canino olive oil and are restoring 25 century old Etruscan-carved caves and tunnels to create wine cellars and a wine tasting environment related to their daughter’s wine and olive oil importing business.