John Wennberg, MD, MPH

In nearly five decades of work, legendary health care researcher John E. “Jack” Wennberg has reshaped the way patients and health care providers measure the value of health care. He is the founder and director emeritus of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor in the Evaluative Clinical Sciences Emeritus at the Geisel School of Medicine.

Wennberg’s breakthrough insights are most notably represented in the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which examines the patterns of medical resource intensity and utilization in the United States. Since its founding by Wennberg in 1996, the Atlas project has reported on patterns of end-of-life care, inequities in the Medicare reimbursement system, and the underuse of preventative medicine, among other topic areas.

This extensive research started small. In 1967, supported by a grant from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, Wennberg compared medical treatments in tiny, similar Vermont towns. To his surprise, he discovered that there were dramatically different surgery rates, despite the towns’ demographic homogeneity. Though Wennberg’s findings were initially ignored by medical publications, Science magazine published the article, “Small area variations in health care delivery” in 1973, and a new type of health care research was “born.”

In 1988, Wennberg founded The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (then the Center for Evaluative and Clinical Sciences), recruiting an international body of scholars and health care researchers to study this new field.

Wennberg earned a BA from Stanford University, an MD from McGill Medical School, and an MPH from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science and the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars. He has received numerous awards, including the National Academy of Medicine’s 2008 Gustav O. Lienhard Award, the Association for Health Services Research's Distinguished Investigator Award, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award in Clinical Medicine, and the Baxter Foundation's Health Services Research Prize.

In 2005, the readers of Modern Physician, Modern Heathcare’s sister publication, voted Wennberg one of the 50 Most Powerful Physician Executives in Healthcare. He is the author of numerous research articles, many of which are in his anthology, as well as of the book “Tracking Medicine: A Researcher’s Quest to Understand Health Care,” which provides a framework for understanding and remedying the U.S. health care crisis.

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