Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice

The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, in Hanover, NH, aspires to be the preeminent research and educational institution devoted to the ongoing reform of the US health care system.

Since 2009, IHME and the Dartmouth Institute have been developing a measure of health risk using data on the distribution of exposure to 11 major behavioral and biometric risk factors in the US population, mortality rates by cause, and estimates of the proportional hazards of risk factor exposure from published systematic reviews. The risk score estimates an individual’s probability of dying over the next 10 years, providing a way for patients and clinicians to assess the impact of different behavioral or clinical interventions on an individual’s risk of death.

The Dartmouth Institute is also collaborating with IHME on the Monitoring Disparities in Chronic Condition Project, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The aim of this project is to create an integrated surveillance system by supplementing existing health records with household surveys and physical examinations in order to understand the differences in chronic conditions between different populations.

King County, WA, is being used as a pilot site for this study. The team at Dartmouth brings their expertise in Medicare records analysis to the project, which is using probabilistic linkage to match complete Medicare records to hospital data.

Individual collaborators:

• Elliott S. Fisher
• Eugene C. Nelson
• Jonathan Skinner