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2005 Eisenberg Legacy Lecture: Understanding Practice Variations

  • John E. Wennberg, MD, MPH

Please join us for a presentation by John E. Wennberg, MD, MPH, our honored guest and this year's John Eisenberg Legacy Lecturer. Dr. Wennberg is director of the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School, a professor in the departments of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine, and the Peggy Y. Thomson Chair for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences.

Dr. Wennberg is nationally recognized for his pioneering work studying variations in U.S. medical practice. For more than 30 years, he has documented strikingly different patterns of care and rates of medical services utilization in different regions of the country and in different hospitals within the same geographic region. His work has consistently found that more medical spending and more health care services are not associated with better patient outcomes. He advocates greater patient involvement in decisions about the patient's care, as well as economic incentives that would encourage health care providers to reduce unwarranted variations in care.

Dr. Wennberg is the principal investigator and series editor of The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which examines patterns of medical resource intensity and utilization in the United States. He co-founded the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, a nonprofit corporation that provides objective scientific information to patients about their treatment options using interactive media. He has received several awards, including the Association for Health Services Research's Distinguished Investigator Award, and the Baxter Foundation's Health Services Research Prize. He is a graduate of Stanford University and the McGill Medical School.