Our Outcomes
Outcomes Programs at Dartmouth
Our Outcomes
From the time of John E. Wennberg's pioneering research on regional variations in health care delivery in the mid 1980's, Dartmouth has pioneered the study of outcomes and remains the leader in this field. Combining our institutional emphasis on medical outcomes and collaboration with other regional institutions through the Northen New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group, Dartmouth has brought quality control and excellence in care to a new level.
Outcomes Programs at Dartmouth
The Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences
The Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) at Dartmouth, established in 1989, is a locus of scientists and clinician-scholars from Dartmouth's medical and graduate schools who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improving the health care system. Learn more.Health Decision Research Program
HDR was established in 2000 as part of the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School. Health Decision Research's mission is to provide a scientifically rigorous and ethically sound basis for effective decision making in preventive, screening, diagnostic, treatment, clinical trial, and palliative care settings. Led by Hilary Llewellyn-Thomas, Ph.D., the program focuses primarily on decisions by consumers and providers of health care, but is also concerned with the perspectives of organizations, agencies, and policy makers in health care. Learn more.Center for Shared Decision Making
The Center for Shared Decision Making is a resource center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, providing information, including a number of video and audiotaped decision aids to people making health care decisions. Learn more.Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group
The Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group is a regional, voluntary, multi-disciplinary group of clinicians, hospital administrators, and health care research personnel who seek to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness, and cost of medical interventions in cardiovascular disease. Learn more.
Reporting of raw (unadjusted) outcomes, including mortality rates and rates of complications can be misleading due to variations in the sickness of patients and variabilities in other factors such as age and co-morbid conditions (other illnesses) which may affect these numbers. It is common, therefore, to adjust (or modify) these numbers to account for these factors. DHMC hopes to have detailed information on our outcomes available in the near future.
DHMC Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery has long participated in the Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group (NNECDSG), a regional, voluntary, multi-disciplinary group of clinicians, hospital administrators, and health care research personnel who seek to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness, and cost of medical interventions in cardiovascular disease. Over the years NNECDSG has shown signficant reductions in the rates of complications across participating hospitals and centers. Outcomes statistics at DHMC have fallen within the range seen by the group as a whole. To learn more about publications from the NNECDSG, please visit its web site and review its many publications related to quality improvement in cardiac intervention.
