Directory

The focus of Dr. Birkmeyer's research is collaborative quality improvement, comparative effectiveness research, and health services research. In her role as a principal research scientist at the Dartmouth Institute, Birkmeyer participates in studies to evaluate treatments and improve the quality of care for a variety of conditions.

Early in her career, her work was devoted to improving the quality of surgical treatment by filling holes in its underlying evidence base. Specifically, in designing and conducting clinical trials to provide answers to critical unanswered questions in surgery. Another strand of her work has focused on policy relevant-health services research. These studies, frequently based on analyses of large administrative databases, have identified structural characteristics of care that underlie variations and disparities in clinical outcomes and relationships between the costs and quality of care. Using meta-analysis, decision analysis, and mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to improve clinical and patient decision-making has also been a focus of her research.

During her 10 years at the University of Michigan, Birkmeyer served as the founding director of the Michigan Bariatric Surgery Collaborative (MBSC). In her role as the MBSC director, she engaged surgeons and morbid obesity patients as active participants in research leading to changes in clinical care, improved outcomes, and changes in related national insurance coverage and policy. Her work showing that the technical skills of bariatric surgeons varied widely and that higher skill ratings were associated with lower complication rates was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and resulted in an NIH-funded study of a peer-coaching intervention to improve surgeon’s proficiency.  

She received a BA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1990, completed an MS in epidemiology and fellowship in the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease at Harvard in 1992, and was the first graduate of the PhD program at Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences in 1997.

Andrew R. Bohm is an epidemiologist and quality improvement scientist with a longstanding interest in emergency and cardiovascular medicine, biostatistics, and implementation science. His work focuses on cardiovascular outcome epidemiology and related policy in the pre-hospital, Emergency Medical Service setting. This research developed out of his prior experience as an Emergency Medical Technician in New York City and the surrounding area for 9 years. Dr. Bohm’s work in the area continues, but his current work also includes statistical methods for quality improvement modeling, implementation science, and allied health services research. He recently served as a biostatistician on the Covid-19 research team for the largest healthcare provider in New York, Northwell Health. 

Bohm earned two BS degrees from Stony Brook University, one in Health Science, and one in Sociology; an MS from Dartmouth College in Healthcare Research; and a Ph.D. from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College in Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Bohm was licensed and certified EMT through the State University of New York.

Martha Bruce is a professor of psychiatry and of community and family medicine at The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. As an implementation scientist, she integrates clinical, sociological, and public health perspectives in the development of clinically relevant interventions designed to reach as many individuals in need as possible. In developing interventions targeting depression in frail older adults, she has worked in partnership with community providers (e.g., primary care, home healthcare, aging services) to enhance sustainability and scalability. The overarching goal of this research is reducing their risk of depression, suicidality, and disability, increasing ability to live independently, and improving access to quality mental health care. Bruce’s career has also focused on mentoring graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career investigators. She has been principal investigator of two NIH-funded R25 grants that support national mentoring networks for early and mid-career researchers, co-director of three NIH postdoctoral training programs, and member of the national advisory committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health and Society Scholars Program. Prior to joining the faculty at Dartmouth, Bruce was a professor of sociology in psychiatry at a Weill Cornell Medical College. There, she served as psychiatry’s associate vice chair for research, and as co-director of Cornell’s NIH-funded Advanced Research Center for Geriatric Mood Disorders. Bruce received her PhD in sociology, MPH in health services, and completed postdoctoral training in psychiatric epidemiology at Yale University.

Tina Foster is a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH, and vice-chair for education in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and preventive medicine. She is program director for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Leadership Preventive Medicine Residency, a unique residency focused on the improvement of health and healthcare services for populations served by Dartmouth-Hitchcock. At The Dartmouth Institute, she co-directs the Microsystem Academy and leads two courses in the residential Master of Public Health program as well as the practicum course for its online program. She has also taught in Dartmouth’s Master of Health Care Delivery Science (MHCDS) and The Dartmouth Institute's online certificate programs. From 2013-2014 she served as national director for the Veteran's Affairs Quality Scholars and chief resident in Quality and Safety programs. She is a member of the leadership team for the International Coproduction of Health Network (ICOHN). Other areas of interest include cognitive simulation, patient safety, effective communication, and encounter-based decision aids. A graduate of University of California San Francisco medical school, she earned an MPH in 1998 from the Harvard School of Public Health and an MS in 2001 from Dartmouth’s Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (now The Dartmouth Institute) while she was a fellow in the Veteran's Affairs Quality Scholars national fellowship program in White River Junction, VT.

Daisy Goodman, DNP, MPH, CNM, CARN-AP is an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and community and family medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine. She also teaches healthcare quality improvement at The Dartmouth Institute. Her clinical background is as a nurse midwife, in which role she has practiced in settings from federally qualified rural health centers to the academic medical center. She also is certified in advanced practice addiction nursing. She received a PhD in nursing practice from the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, an MPH from The Dartmouth Institute, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in healthcare improvement through the VA Quality Scholars program. She served as a maternal infant health advisor for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) from 2016-2017 and represented the American College of Nurse Midwives in the development of the Alliance for Innovation in Maternal Health Patient Safety Bundle for the Perinatal Care of Women with Opioid Use Disorders.
 
Goodman directs women’s health services for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Perinatal Addiction Treatment Program and was one of the first wave of advanced practice nurses in New Hampshire to become a buprenorphine prescriber. Her research and work in quality improvement focus on improving access to treatment for opioid use disorders for pregnant and parenting women through integrated delivery models. She currently leads a three-year initiative to implement best practice in the care of pregnant women with opioid use disorders through the Northern New England Perinatal Quality Improvement Network and a multi-site comparative effectiveness study comparing models of care for medication assisted treatment for pregnant women with opioid use disorders funded by  the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Dr. Karen Huyck, MD, PhD, MPH, FACOEM is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth in the Section of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and a board-certified OEM physician. She is currently serving as the Medical Director for Vermont RETAIN, a project with the Vermont Department of Labor the aims to increase employment retention and decrease work disability across the state and inform national disability programs and policies. She received her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology, completed her MPH in Environmental Health, and completed her post-doctoral fellowship in Environmental Molecular Epidemiology. Her clinical and research work includes management and treatment of complex work injuries, functional assessment and recovery, prevention of work disability, and gene-environment interaction in complex human disease. She is a co-founder of the New England Work Injury Collaborative and a member of the Translation of Rehabilitation Engineering Advances and Technology (TREAT) consortium through the The National Institutes of Health Medical Rehabilitation Research Infrastructure Network (MRRIN). Prior to her position at Dartmouth, she worked in diverse OEM settings, including as an on-site physician for biotechnology companies, staff OEM physician, researcher, disability consultant, utilization reviewer, impartial medical examiner, and expert witness.

Kathryn B. Kirkland, MD, a professor of medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, with a secondary appointment at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, serves as chief of the section of palliative medicine.  She holds the Dorothy and John J. Byrne, Jr, Distinguished Chair in Palliative Medicine.  In addition to her leadership role, she is actively engaged in clinical work with patients who are facing serious illness, and in teaching medical students, residents and fellows.  

Her primary scholarly interest is in the field of narrative medicine, which focuses on building capacity of clinicians to receive the stories of others, and to use them to ensure that patients receive individualized healthcare that is aligned with their values. She has received grant support from the Mellon and the Gold Foundations for work in medical humanities.  

For the first 20 years of her professional career, Kirkland was an infectious disease specialist and healthcare epidemiologist at Dartmouth and at Duke.  She has served as vice chair for quality in the department of medicine and as a coach and associate program director for leadership development in the innovative Leadership Preventive Medicine Residency program at Dartmouth. 

Kirkland holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MD from Dartmouth Medical School.

Al Mulley is the managing director of the Institute’s Global Health Care Delivery Science Program. The program is dedicated to forging partnerships around the world to build the capabilities essential to achieving sustainable health care economies. Prior to his appointment at Dartmouth, he was at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served as chief of general medicine for nearly three decades. In the past, his clinical training and research interests have spanned from intensive medical care to the integration of primary care and population health, always with a focus on the quality of decisions made, whether it’s from the frontlines of care to the leadership level of health systems. Mulley is the founding editor of the text, Primary Care Medicine, with the eighth addition currently in preparation. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves as a visiting professor and/or Fellow in multiple countries, including the United Kingdom and China.

He holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and an MPP from Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Honor Passow, PhD, teaches research methods, including biostatistics, epidemiology, survey research methods, and technical writing in The Dartmouth Institute’s graduate programs.  About half of her research has been at the Institute. Her research experience has spanned a wide array of methods, including interviews (regarding patient decision making), surveys (regarding student cheating and professional competencies among engineers), Medicare administrative data (regarding prostate cancer screening), linked data between Medicare and the Nurses’ Health Study survey (regarding cognitive decline in the elderly), document review (regarding the influence of medical journals’ press releases on the quality of newspaper coverage), experiments (regarding the flow of slurries under vibration), narrative literature synthesis (regarding screening mammography), and systematic literature review (regarding on-the-job competence among engineers and “exnovation”, that is, how physicians reject or abandon an innovation after adopting it). She is a peer reviewer for journals that focus on the education of professionals.

Scott Shipman, MD, MPH, is director of clinical innovations and director of primary care affairs at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Shipman works with a wide range of health system leaders to promote effective innovations in ambulatory care delivery and teaching. A general pediatrician and health services researcher by training, he has studied the health care workforce extensively.  He guides AAMC activities promoting emerging high-value ambulatory care models within AMCs and affiliates, with a focus on improving care at the interface of primary care and specialty care. At Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Shipman supports care transformation efforts on a limited basis, including a growing community health worker program and efforts to improve communication, coordination, and efficiency between primary care and specialty care physicians in the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth and its affiliated community practices. He works with online students in the Dartmouth Institute MPH program on their practicum requirement. He received an MD from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, completed a residency at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Johns Hopkins, where he also received his MPH.  

Corey A. Siegel, MD, MS, is the Section Chief of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and the Co-Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Center at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He is a Professor of Medicine and of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

Dr. Siegel received his medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts in 1998.  He completed his residency in internal medicine at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.  Dr. Siegel served as chief medical resident at Dartmouth from 2001-2002, where he also completed a fellowship in gastroenterology.  From 2004-2005, he completed a fellowship in Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Dr. Siegel’s research interests include understanding risk/benefit tradeoffs in IBD, developing models to predict outcomes in Crohn’s disease, creating tools to facilitate shared decision making, expanding telemedicine services to patients with IBD living in rural locations, and improving the quality of care delivered to patients with IBD. He has been funded by the NIH, AHRQ, the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, and the Helmsley Charitable Trust for this work.  He has lectured nationally and internationally, and published numerous journal articles and book chapters on this and other topics in IBD. Dr. Siegel was inducted into the International Organization for the Study of IBD (IOIBD) in 2013. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire with his wife and three boys.

Brenda Sirovich is a general internist, researcher, and educator at The Dartmouth Institute and Geisel School of Medicine. Practicing at the VA Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont, Sirovich has been caring for and learning from her veteran patients for nearly 20 years, and also attends on the in-patient medicine service. Along with Phil Goodney, she co-directs the VA Outcomes Group, a small multidisciplinary research group, where she enjoys mentoring fellows and junior faculty in many specialties. Her research examines clinical practice intensity—the tendency of clinicians to order tests, referrals, and treatments for patients, exploring both causes and consequences of different practice patterns. Delighted to be entering her 8th year directing an intermediate level Epidemiology and Biostatistics elective in the Institute’s residential MS/MPH program, From Observational Data to Valid Inference: Regression and Other Approaches, she has also been deeply involved (some might aptly say buried) in building and directing a new 2-year course sequence at Geisel. Now in its 3rd year, Patients & Populations: Improving Health & Healthcare seeks to develop in medical students the knowledge, capabilities, and motivation to allow them to make a difference on a larger scale, improving the health of communities and populations, and the effectiveness and value of health care.

Sirovich is a proud graduate of Hunter College High School (NYC). She earned a BA in applied mathematics from Harvard College, an MD from the Yale University School of Medicine, and an MS from the Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth (now The Dartmouth Institute).