James Weinstein

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“You can’t wait until your life isn’t hard anymore to be happy”

                                                            Jane Kristen Marczewski

Dr. Jim Weinstein is Senior Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare, where he leads strategy, innovation and health equity. Throughout his career, he has been motivated by a passion for finding the truth and doing what is best for patients. 

After establishing his career as a world-renowned spine surgeon and pain researcher, Dr. Weinstein moved his practice to Dartmouth to study geographic variation in healthcare as part of the Dartmouth Atlas Leadership team. His research revealed tremendous unwarranted variation and racial disparities in the use of surgical treatment for musculoskeletal diseases. He espoused regional practice variation driven by medical opinion rather than sound science or the preferences of well-informed patients. In response, he pioneered the transition away from the traditional doctrine of “informed consent” to one of “informed choice” —acknowledging that a patient should not only agree to a treatment, but that they should have an active role in deciding which treatment is best when multiple options exist, with similar outcomes. To put this philosophy into clinical practice, he established the, first-in-the-nation, Center for Shared Decision Making at Dartmouth and instituted Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs)–a patient perception-based performance indicator that he had introduced while still a resident at Rush Medical Center in Chicago–as an additional means of informing clinical practice and assessing true value-based efficacy. Today, informed patient choice and PROMs continue to play a substantial role in efforts to reform our nation’s healthcare system.

Dr. Weinstein also sought to improve the evidence-base to better inform treatment decisions, securing the largest grant ever funded from NIAMS/NIH ($30 million) to perform the Spine Patient Outcomes Research Trial (SPORT). The study revealed that informed patients often choose very differently from their physician, with outcomes that were as good or better.

In 2011, Dr. Weinstein transformed the center of the evaluative clinical sciences to The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI) and established the National High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC), receiving a $26 million grant from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. HVHC was an open-source system for sharing best-practices and protocols across a partnership of 20 health systems, across 50 states, which improved quality of care while lowering costs. In a compelling use case, the HVHC’s dissemination model decreased in-hospital mortality from sepsis by 8%, saving thousands of lives. 

Dr. Weinstein was appointed CEO of the Dartmouth-Health system, where he brought together 8 regional hospitals to affect a value-based population health strategy. He was influential in local, regional and national policy decisions to develop an ideal, evidence-based real-time, clinical system with continuous quality improvement and total transparency.

In 2015, Dr. Weinstein was appointed by President Obama to the Special Medical Advisory Group for the Veterans Administration where he served three secretaries. From 2016 to 2018, he chaired the first national Academy of Medicine (NAM) Committee on Community Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the U.S, which published the 2017 report, “Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity.” 

He currently serves on the Boards of Trustees of the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, the Charles Drew University Medical School, the Intermountain Health System, and the Advanced Regenerative Medicine Institute, a Department of Defense program to 3D-print human organs. He also serves on the advisory board for Equity for Centene, the nation’s largest Medicaid managed care organization. 

Dr. Weinstein has published more than 325 peer-reviewed articles and served as Editor-in-Chief of Spine for three decades. He is frequently consulted by members of Congress and government leaders on health policy and reform. He advises on the Gates Venture Fund initiatives and has participated in the prestigious World Economic Forum. His book, “Unraveled: Prescriptions to Repair a Broken Health Care System,” was published in 2016.  

By seamlessly integrating multiple disciplines and fields of study, Dr. Weinstein has achieved a diverse set of contributions in the areas of basic science, clinical practice, health services research and health policy. All the while, he has consistently campaigned for patient agency and personal ownership of private health information. Today, he continues his work to improve population health, reduce disparities, and transform health care so that the system can sustainably and ethically deliver high value care for all.

“Don’t you want to see what happens if you don’t give up ”

                                                Jane Kristen Marczewski