Elliott Fisher

Dr. Fisher is Professor of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and Director for Population Health and Policy at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Care Policy and Clinical Practice. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Washington, where he also was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and received a Master’s in Public Health. At Dartmouth, he was a founding director is now Senior Associate of the VA Outcomes Group, has recently replaced John Wennberg as Director of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, and is the Principal Investigator of the CDC-funded Dartmouth Population Health Research Center.

His research focuses on exploring the causes of the two fold differences in spending observed across U.S. regions and health care systems —and the consequences of these variations for health and health care. His work demonstrating that higher spending regions and health systems do not achieve better outcomes or quality has had a major impact on current thinking about health care and health care reform. He is also actively engaged in developing practical approaches to health care delivery and payment system reform, most recently through his proposal to foster the development of Accountable Care Organizations. He has served on the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and now chairs a committee of the National Quality Forum charged with the development and implementation of a new measurement framework intended to improve health outcomes and the value of health care services. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine.