Dr. James N. Weinstein is the Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare, Head of Innovation and Health Equity. He is the immediate past Chief Executive Officer and President of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health. The $2 billion system includes New Hampshire’s only academic medical center and a network of affiliated hospitals and clinics across Vermont and New Hampshire, serving a patient population of about 2 million. Under his leadership, Dartmouth-Hitchcock worked to create a “sustainable health system” for the patients and communities it serves, for generations to come. As leader of a bi-state health system, he created an operating model based in population health and transitioned the region from fee-for-service toward more global payments. He built partnerships with a variety of providers throughout northern New England and the United States, to deliver optimum care at lowest cost to patients in the region.
Immediately prior to becoming CEO in 2011, Dr. Weinstein served as President of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, leader of the 1200 physicians across the Dartmouth-Hitchcock system, and was Director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), home of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. For decades the Atlas has documented the ongoing variations in health care delivery across the United States. His dual positions as Clinic President and TDI Director allowed him to build critical linkages between the groundbreaking health services research of TDI and the clinical care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and nationally, with a focus on better understanding and meeting the population health needs of the region Dartmouth-Hitchcock serves and the nation.
During his time as Director of TDI, Dr. Weinstein co-founded, with then Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim (now President of the World Bank), the Master of Health Care Delivery Science (MHCDS) program, a collaboration between TDI and the Tuck School of Business, and the first hybrid residential and distance learning degree program at Dartmouth. He was recently appointed as a Visiting Professor in the Northwestern Kellogg Business School, Public & Private Interface initiative and Senior Fellow, the HealthCare Initiative, Clinical Professor TUCK Business School at Dartmouth. At Kellogg he will teach a new course, “CEO Playbook for Health System Success”. He has, on several occasions, been a facilitator for the Harvard Business School, case study of the Dartmouth Spine Center, he created in 1996, written by Mike Porter and Rob Huckman.
Dr. Weinstein is former Executive Director and a founding member, along with Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, TDI, and Denver Health, of the national High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC; 70 million patients, 70,000 physicians), a partnership of more than a dozen health systems that have taken on the challenge of improving the quality of care while lowering costs. The Collaborative allows for unprecedented data sharing, including electronic medical record data from each system, and the collection of patient reported measures, which Dr Weinstein started in the in 1982.
As a researcher and internationally renowned spine surgeon, Dr. Weinstein developed the classification system by which surgeons around the world treat cancers of the spine, as well as award-winning models for understanding pain mechanisms seen in millions of back pain patients. He has received more than $70 million in federal funding and has published more than 325 peer-reviewed articles. He is a leader in advancing “informed choice” to ensure patients receive evidence-based, safe, effective, efficient, and appropriate care. In 1999, he established the first-in-the-world Center for Shared Decision-Making at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, now used nationally and internationally. He also founded the multidisciplinary Spine Center at the University of Iowa in 1985 and at Dartmouth-Hitchcock in 1997, which has become an international model for patient-centered health care delivery and incorporates patient-reported outcomes in clinical practice, adding a new dimension to the process and clinical measurements traditionally used to judge the efficacy and value of care, the first example of Value Based clinical care models. In 2015, Dr. Weinstein co-developed ImagineCare, a virtual health care system that incorporates 24/7 connectivity to manage chronic diseases outside the traditional bricks and mortar hospital based systems. ImagineCare will be implemented in Sweden this fall.
Most recently, he is helping to lead the formation of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) which, with an $80 million grant from the Department of Defense and more than $300 million in private sector funding, will use 3D technology to print human organs, a development that could transform the world of organ transplantation and the lives of millions affected by diseases such as kidney disease and diabetes. He is a member of the Board of Directors of ARMI/BioFab.
Dr. Weinstein holds the distinguished Peggy Y. Thomson Chair in the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on the organization’s Board for Population Health and Public Health Practice. He served as Chair of the NAM Committee on Community Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the U.S, which recently published the report, “Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity, and has recently been elected to the Boards of Trustees for the internationally renowned Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, the DOD ARMI/BioFab project and the Intermountain Health System.
Dr. Weinstein is an appointee to the Special Medical Advisory Group of the VA, which provides advice to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs and the Under Secretary for Health on matters relating to the care and treatment of veterans. He has been appointed to a special task force to assist in the reorganization of the active Military Health System, Army, Navy, Marines, Airforce and TriCare. He is frequently consulted by members of Congress and the Administration, as well as government leaders, on health policy and health reform.
In 2015, Dr. Weinstein was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations. He is the 2017 recipient of the American Hospital Association’s Justin Ford Kimball Innovator’s Award. He has been named one of “The 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” by Modern Healthcare magazine and top “Physician Leaders to Know” by Becker’s Hospital Review.
Dr. Weinstein recently stepped down from the position of CEO and President in June of 2017, so that he may focus more closely on national health care issues, particularly around innovations in health system design and care delivery. He also plans to continue his leadership roles in HVHC, ARMI, and other initiatives. His book, Unraveled: Prescriptions to Repair a Broken Health Care System, was published in February 2016.
