The Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School opens its doors this week to the first class of students entering a new master's program focusing on health care evaluation, health policy and medical decision-making.
Participants in this program include 16 full-time and 25 part-time students. A third are involved in clinical care, working as nurses or physicians throughout the Northeast. The other two-thirds hold jobs in the health care sector.
"The students, as varied as they are, all share a common element," said Dr. Harold Swartz, director of educational programs for the center. "They all want a more sophisticated understanding of the factors that affect health care in this country and how those factors are analyzed."
The program will prepare its students for an expected transformation of the nation's health care system, which was proposed earlier this month by the Clinton administration.
"If key players in our health care system can learn what is and is not effective and then do only those things that are effective, there will be more opportunity to make the dollars we spend on health care really count," Swartz said.
The faculty for the new graduate program consists of well-known policy makers and researchers in health care evaluation, such as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop '37 and Dr. John Wennberg. Wennberg is the director of the center and a professor of epidemiology at the Dartmouth Medical School, well-known for his research in health care and his new approaches to medical decision-making.
The program can be pursued as a separate program or in combination with medical school enrollment or residency at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, allowing maximum flexibility for mid-career professionals.
The program focuses on three areas of the professional health care system: variations and outcomes research, health behavior and medical decision making and health policy, according to a news release.
