About the Center for Health Policy Research

The Center for Health Policy Research at TDI blends teaching, research, outreach, and policy development to educate and inform. Through innovative initiatives and broad collaboration, CHPR is a force for changing the delivery, access, and financing of health care in America.

Center leaders and staff ponder critical, previously unasked questions. Is more necessarily better? What is the "right" size of the physician workforce? Are we guilty of too much diagnosis of disease?

Home to the Dartmouth Atlas Project, the Center has expanded its work on geographic variation to document the underuse of effective care, misuse of preference-sensitive care, and overuse of supply-sensitive care in the U.S. health care system.

The faculty at the Institute is instrumental in revealing that forces besides scientific advances and public demand have contributed to the crisis in American health care over the last quarter of the 20th century.

Center Director, Dr. David C. Goodman, is Professor of Pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School and Professor of Health Policy at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Dr. Goodman’s research interest is geographic and provider variation in health care quality and efficiency with a particular focus on the physician workforce. He is the principal investigator of the Primary Care Service Area Project and Co-Principal Investigator of the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare. His papers and editorials have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, BMJ, and Pediatrics. Dr. Goodman is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Health Services Research.

Dr. Goodman received his medical degree from the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center and his master’s degree in the medical care epidemiology from Dartmouth College. He served his residency in pediatrics at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. After joining the Dartmouth faculty in 1988, he undertook allergy and clinical immunology training and then served for a number of years as the Chief of the Section of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.