James Weinstein

Dr. James N. Weinstein joined Microsoft in July 2018 as Senior Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare, leading strategy, and innovation. During the pandemic, he has worked with Operation Warp speed and various organizations around the world, including, WHO, CDC as well as state and local government efforts to bring the Microsoft vaccine platform for enrolling, disseminating, and tracking vaccine participants. He serves as executive sponsor for some the largest health delivery systems in the world, including, NHS, HCA, CVS, MGB (the Harvard system), John’s Hopkins, Centene, Kaiser and many others. For Microsoft, he also leads several population health efforts to forge new paths to end racial and ethnic disparities. He is a a pioneer in remote care delivery via telemedicine and remote sensor technologies. He recently served on the Biden campaign advisory committee. Dr. James N. Weinstein is the immediate past Chief Executive Officer and President of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health. The $2.5 billion system includes New Hampshire's only academic medical center and a network of affiliated hospitals and clinics across Vermont and New Hampshire, serving a patient population of about 2 million. Under his leadership, Dartmouth-Hitchcock worked to create a “sustainable health system” for the patients and communities it serves, for generations to come. As leader of a bi-state health system, he created an operating model based in population health locally and nationally. The 7 hospital system ranked in the top 1% for quality. He created a joint venture with Harvard Pilgrim to create a new health plan for Northern New England. He worked with Congress during three prior administrations, and helped lead the ACO, population-based strategies and led national efforts in Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROM’s) and Health Equity. In 2010 Epic, the most used electronic health record, adopted his PROM’s from the Dartmouth Spine Center model to implement nationally. He built partnerships with a variety of providers throughout northern New England and across the United States, to deliver optimum care at lowest cost to patients in the region. Immediately prior to becoming CEO in 2011, Dr. Weinstein served as President of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, leader of the physicians across the Dartmouth-Hitchcock system, and was Director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), home of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. For decades, the Atlas has documented the ongoing variations in health care delivery across the United States. His dual positions as Clinic President and TDI Director allowed him to build critical linkages between the groundbreaking health services research of TDI and the clinical care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and nationally, with a focus on better understanding and meeting the population health needs of the region Dartmouth-Hitchcock serves and the nation.

During his time as Director of TDI, Dr. Weinstein co-founded, with then Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim (past President of the World Bank), the Master of Health Care Delivery Science (MHCDS) program, a collaboration between TDI and the Tuck School of Business, and the first hybrid residential and distance learning degree program at Dartmouth. He holds a Clinical Professor in the Northwestern Kellogg Business School, Public & Private Interface initiative. He teaches a new course, “CEO Playbook for Health System Success”, and teaches each year at the Harvard Business school and TUCK school of Business at Dartmouth.

Dr. Weinstein is former Executive Director and a founding member, along with Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, Cleveland Clinic and Geisinger Clinic, TDI, and Denver Health, of the national High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC; 70 million patients, 70,000 physicians), a partnership of more than a dozen health systems, across all 50 states, that have taken on the challenge of improving the quality of care while lowering costs. The Collaborative allowed for unprecedented data sharing, including electronic medical record data from each system, and the collection of patient-reported measures, which Dr Weinstein initiated in the in 1982 and congress has now adopted as part of meaningful use. The national sepsis efforts supported by $30 million CMMI (CMS) award led to marked decreases in mortality and significant cost savings nationally. Today there several for profit collaboratives being formed in which Dr Weinstein serves as an advisor.

As a researcher and internationally renowned spine surgeon, Dr. Weinstein developed the classification system by which surgeons around the world treat cancers of the spine, as well as award-winning models for understanding pain mechanisms seen in millions of back pain patients. He has received more than $70 million in federal funding and has published more than 330 peer-reviewed articles. He is a leader in advancing "informed choice" to ensure patients receive evidence-based, safe, effective, efficient, and appropriate care. In 1999, he established the first-in-the-world Center for Shared Decision-Making at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, now used nationally and internationally. Patient Choice is now playing a strong role in our nations path to improving care and lowering cost. He also founded the multidisciplinary Spine Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, an international model for patient-centered health care delivery and incorporates patient-reported outcomes in clinical practice, adding a new dimension to the process and clinical measurements traditionally used to judge the efficacy and value of care. In 2015, Dr. Weinstein co-developed ImagineCare, a virtual health care system that incorporates 24/7 connectivity to manage chronic diseases outside the traditional bricks and mortar hospital based systems. ImagineCare implemented in Scandinavia this summer. Today, Dr Weinstein is working with AXA, a major European health plan, in 56 countries, to create a virtual health system. Several other efforts are underway with various Microsoft customers to improve population health across the quadruple aim, using technology as a enabler of value based care.

In the past few years, he’s helped lead the formation of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI), funded initially by an $80 million grant from the Department of Defense and more than $300 million in private sector funding. ARMI uses 3D technology to print human organs, a development that could transform the world of organ transplantation and the lives of millions affected by diseases such as kidney disease and diabetes. He is a member of the Board of Directors of ARMI/BioFab.

Dr. Weinstein held the distinguished Peggy Y. Thomson Chair in the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth before joining Microsoft. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on the organization’s Board for Population Health and Public Health Practice. He served as Chair of the NAM Committee on Community Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the U.S, which recently published the report, “Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity, and serves on several Boards of Trustees including the internationally renowned Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, the Intermountain Health System and the RESEARCH Advisory Board for the Kaiser Health system. He is co-author of a NAM paper, the role of Digital Health during Covid19. He has proposed a new model, the Federal Reserve for Health, in the vision of the Federal reserve for banking.

Dr. Weinstein has been an appointee to the Special Medical Advisory Group of the VA, which provides advice to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs and the Under Secretary for Health on matters relating to the care and treatment of veterans. He is frequently consulted by members of Congress and the Administration, as well as government leaders on health policy and health reform.

In 2015, Dr. Weinstein was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations. He is the 2017 recipient of the American Hospital Association’s Justin Ford Kimball Innovator’s Award. He has been named one of “The 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” by Modern Healthcare magazine and top 50 “Physician Leaders to Know” by Becker’s Hospital Review.

His most recent book, Unraveled: Prescriptions to Repair a Broken Health Care System, was published in February 2016 serves as a roadmap for many of the changes needed in Health Care. It has received wonderful reviews and serves as a blueprint for much needed change in health care delivery and accountability.