John Wennberg

In June 2007, Wennberg stepped down as director of the CECS, now known as The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI).

Wennberg's recent work has focused on documenting outcomes and communicating outcomes information to patients. That focus is reflected in his article in the November/December 2007 issue of Health Affairs. In the first part of a two-part article, Wennberg and his coauthors urge the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to use its pay-for-performance program to ensure that patients are both informed and empowered to choose appropriate discretionary treatments.

Indeed, Wennberg's work has shown that areas that spend more and provide more services often experience worse outcomes than lower-spending areas that provide less intensive care. In a 2002 Health Affairs article, Wennberg proposed a Medicare reform plan based on reducing unwarranted regional variations in spending by the program.

He is the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor Emeritus in the Evaluative Clinical Sciences & Founder and Director Emeritus of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice (formerly the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences), and has been Professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine since 1980 and in the Department of Medicine since 1989. Wennberg is the founding editor of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, a series of reports on how health care is used and distributed in the United States.

In 1967, Wennberg worked with the Regional Medical Program created with a $350,000 grant from President Lyndon Johnson and began analyzing Medicare data to determine how well hospitals and doctors were performing. "Our results were fascinating, because they ran completely counter to what conventional wisdom said they would be. Everyone expected that we would clearly see underservice in the rural hospital service areas remote from academic medical centers. But when we looked at the data, we found tremendous variation in every aspect of healthcare delivery, even among communities served by academic medical centers. We found the same thing when we compare healthcare in the Boston and New Haven communities served by some of the finest academic medical centers in the world. The basic premise—that medicine was driven by science and by physicians capable of making clinical decisions based on well-established fact and theory—was simply incompatible with the data we saw. It was immediately apparent that suppliers were more important in driving demand than had been previously realized," stated Wennberg.

John E. "Jack" Wennberg (born June 2, 1934) is the pioneer and leading researcher of unwarranted variation in the healthcare industry. In four decades of work, Wennberg has documented the geographic variation in the healthcare that patients receive in the United States. In 1988, he founded the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School (now The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth) to address that unwarranted variation in healthcare.