John H. Wasson, professor of community and family medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, is working with a team of researchers to help physicians lower the cost of running their practices and to increase patients' role in maintaining healthy lifestyles. He is conducting the research with the St. Louis Area Business Health Coalition and Primaris Missouri's health quality improvement organization. A focus of the project will be on improving the efficiency of physicians' offices by utilizing fewer staff members. Wasson's research has found that by cutting expenses, physicians can spend more time with each patient. The Commonwealth Fund is helping to pay for the project, which will last 18 months and begin on Jan. 1.
Former Dartmouth Provost and current Columbia University President Lee Bollinger was criticized by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City for allowing protests by students at Columbia last Friday. Protestors were trying to stop guest speaker Jim Gilchrist, who heads the Minuteman Project, which was initiated last year by a group volunteers to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border for illegal immigrants. Bloomberg criticized Bollinger's inability to control Friday's protest that ended in physical violence. Bollinger, a legal scholar who specializes in free speech and the First Amendment, said that if students and faculty have the right to bring speakers to campus, then others have the right to protest. Bollinger also agreed, however, that no one had the right or power to silence a speaker. Measures would be taken over the next several weeks to reinforce safe, free speech on campus, he said.
Elliott Fisher, professor of community and family medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences, was elected by the Institute of Medicine to become one of its 65 new active members. Fisher is the founding director and senior associate of the VA Outcomes Group of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt. Fisher's current research is focused on regions within the United States that have high medical spending but that do not provide better quality care or achieve better long-term health outcomes.
