John Wennberg
American academic
John E. "Jack" Wennberg (June 2, 1934 – March 10, 2024) was an American healthcare researcher who was a pioneer 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.
Wennberg was 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 was the Professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine since 1980 and in the Department of Medicine since 1989. Wennberg was 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 June 2007, Wennberg stepped down as director of the CECS, now known as The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI).
Education
Wennberg was a graduate of Stanford University and the McGill University Faculty of Medicine. His postgraduate training was in internal medicine and nephrology at Johns Hopkins University, but he became interested in the application of epidemiological principles to the health care system while pursuing his master's degree in Public Health at Johns Hopkins.
Wennberg was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars.
Work
He cofounded the Informed Medical Decisions Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts, a nonprofit organization to provide objective scientific information to patients about their treatment choices by using interactive media.
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