Eugene C. Nelson, DSc, MPH

Eugene Nelson is a professor of community and family medicine at The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He serves as the director of Population Health and Measurement at The Dartmouth Institute and leads a program on new models to advance the coproduction of health care. Nelson is a national leader in health care improvement and the development and application of measures of quality, system performance, health outcomes, value, and patient perceptions. His current work is focused on using patient-centered registries to develop learning health systems capable of coproducing improved health care and innovative science. He leads a Dartmouth team that is conducting national proof of concept demonstration programs for several chronic disease populations including cystic fibrosis, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and rheumatology.  

In the early 1990’s, Nelson and his colleagues at Dartmouth began developing clinical microsystem thinking. His work developing the “clinical value compass” and “whole system measures” to assess health care system performance has made him a well-recognized quality and value measurement expert.

He is the recipient of The Joint Commission’s Ernest A. Codman award for his work on outcomes measurement in health care. Nelson has been a pioneer in bringing modern quality improvement thinking into the mainstream of health care; he helped launch the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and served as a founding board member. He has authored over 150 publications and is an author of two recent books: Quality by Design: A Clinical Microsystems Approach and Value by Design: Developing Clinical Microsystems to Achieve Organizational Excellence. 

He received an AB from Dartmouth College, an MPH from Yale University, and a DSc from Harvard University.

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