“Given the current state of the world, the lack of healthcare access for specific populations is highlighted. Every child, regardless of race or economic status, deserves access to healthcare. Every child deserves a fair chance.”

A pediatric cardiovascular ICU nurse in San Francisco, CA, Chandler Rosemont has traveled across the world on medical missions to bring medical care to the rural depths of Kenya and India. In India, her team uncovered why nearly all the children they treated had gastritis, esophagitis, and an aversion to food and eating – the parents were cooking food over burning trash indoors. For Rosemont, the experience opened her eyes to the lack of preventative disease education and access to follow-up care.

“These practices will not change because a group of people came in to do medical mission work once,” Rosemont says. “These children require consistent care to ensure they are meeting their growth and nutrition requirements ... insert Dartmouth!” At Dartmouth, Rosemont is energized to work with her classmates to bring their healthcare visions to life, including Rosemont’s goal of creating sustainable healthcare access for pediatric patients in rural settings.

“Dartmouth’s MPH program will allow me to learn and work side by side with some of the great current and future healthcare leaders and activists to realize healthcare as a right and not a luxury.”

Throughout his time working in the political arena, in the military as a U.S. Army Officer, and now in the biotech industry, Vorry Moon’s interest in reshaping how Americans access to healthcare has grown exponentially. His healthcare ambitions are also influenced in part from his recent efforts with the U.S. Army Reserve to aid in COVID-19 response. Throughout Spring 2020, he worked with the Army to create and sustain field hospitals across the contiguous United States to treat the overflow of patients and help make sure they received the care they needed. These efforts included transforming a Seattle, WA, football field into a 250-bed hospital.

For Moon, Dartmouth will put him back on the frontlines, this time from a healthcare policy perspective, to help get the U.S. over the tipping point to provide access to high-quality preventative and curative healthcare for all Americans.

“I have a passion for not just changing the vision others have of rural medicine, but keeping rural practices current in quality, access, innovation, and more. It’s my hope that an MPH from Dartmouth will help give me the skills to give rural populations a voice.”

For the last 11 years, Heidi Helgeson has worked in the small rural/frontier community in Del Norte, CO. There she is a practicing family medicine physician and Chief Medical Officer for Rio Grande Hospital, a rural critical access hospital.

Helgeson is passionate about helping her hospital and community navigate the resource challenges that many in rural areas like theirs face. These include addressing physician recruitment and retention; inadequate access to high-speed internet, phone service, and other technology compared to highly populated areas; as well as geographic isolation with having to travel several hundred miles to receive specialty care. An opportunity Helgeson sees in rural medicine is to find ways for counties to pool and share resources together through the establishment of public health consortiums.

"I’m most interested in looking at how we can increase participation in clinical research, and how more diverse clinical trial subjects could lead to better therapeutics and better outcomes in the long term.”

Kristina Malzbender manages a portfolio of philanthropic work, investments, and research funding for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in her role as an associate director of health and life sciences at Gates Ventures. The field of Alzheimer’s disease has not seen any new drug gain approval in the U.S. in over 15 years. Malzbender says that incremental advancements such as better biomarkers, more diversity in the therapeutic pipeline, and facilitating participation in clinical trials will be some initial steps to advance research. It will also require collaboration across healthcare providers, innovators, patient organizations, and philanthropy.

At Dartmouth, Malzbender says that gaining the knowledge and competencies of an MPH will round out her philanthropy work while developing close relationships with her classmates from a diverse array of backgrounds. She is also interested in exploring how to better leverage digital tools to increase access to care and facilitate increased innovation in clinical trials.

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“The mandatory childhood vaccination referendum in Maine pushed me to pursue a Master of Public Health, after hearing about how local pediatricians used their positions to successfully advocate for a policy that will protect everyone’s health.”

Amanda Coyle, an aspiring medical student from Alberta, Canada, believes it is critical for physicians to be trained in public health and medicine to adequately problem solve how to improve population health and wellbeing. Attending Dartmouth early in her medical training will enable her to develop a public health lens that she can apply throughout the rest of her career. As a future physician she wants to specialize in reproductive and sexual health, while focusing on removing barriers to accessing contraception.

Coyle knows that working toward equal access to healthcare goes beyond the work of physicians and includes a variety of stakeholders in healthcare. At Dartmouth she wants to leverage the expertise of her classmates and faculty to work toward this goal.
 

“My goal as an eventual clinician and healthcare advocate is to create a facility in a traditionally medically under-served community that provides preventive care such as screenings for hypertension, dental cleanings, eye exams, and exercise classes to promote healthy living.”

As an optical manager of a small ophthalmic practice in Maryland, Edgard Ngono saw too many patients come in and not be able to qualify for certain treatments due to a lack of adequate insurance coverage. These experiences helped him realize that it is only through health policy reform that this systemic issue can be fixed.

Determined to impact healthcare on a more macro level, Ngono was inspired by a Dartmouth Institute MPH class he sat in on taught by Eric Wadsworth, a leading expert in healthcare finance. The course, which explores the strategic and financial management of healthcare, underscored for Ngono the importance of how healthcare policy can directly impact health outcomes. The course also cemented his path at Dartmouth as the place to work with a diverse group of healthcare advocates to begin rooting out the underlying causes of health disparities.

“I strongly believe that the United States healthcare system should not be in the way of treatment, but rather facilitate it, and as [future] health policymakers and advocates, we have the power to make that happen.”

For Ovya Ganesan, the intersection between research and raw science with health policy is critical to create more efficient healthcare systems. A recent UC Berkeley graduate with a degree in molecular and cellular biology, Ganesan seeks to bridge a disconnect between scientists and policymakers to help make science more understandable for shaping healthcare policy. She sees Dartmouth as the opportunity to join her fellow classmates to drive disruptive change in healthcare, and she brings much experience to inform that direction.

Volunteering as an HIV-prevention counselor and homeless outreach volunteer in the Berkeley community exposed her to stories of how marginalized people have “fallen through the cracks of the U.S. healthcare system.” At Berkeley, she co-founded and taught a health policy and advocacy course – Berkeley’s first undergraduate student-taught course in this field – designed to provide students with advocacy tools to be engaged citizens in healthcare politics.

“The high cost of care and insurance coupled with the lack of access to care are paramount problems that the U.S. faces today. We need to knock down barriers and take a community-focused approach to deliver high-quality care at an affordable price to the public.”

With experience working as an actuarial analyst for a health insurance company in Massachusetts, Max Vogt has had to crunch the numbers that go into determining insurance premiums for consumers. Driven to know more about the factors causing higher premiums and ultimately higher costs for patients, at Dartmouth he is eager to broaden his understanding of policy development and the overall financing and management of healthcare systems. He wants to explore the topics of cost reduction, quality improvement, and transparency of the healthcare system between providers, insurers, and consumers.

Through the MPH program, Vogt's aim is to pivot his career and transition into a healthcare strategy role where he can collaborate with others to achieve high quality care in a manner that is both comprehensive and affordable.