Health Assessment Laboratory

Board Officers

Dr. Michael Zubkoff

Dr. Michael Zubkoff currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Health Assessment Lab/Medical Outcomes Trust (HAL/MOT); and Director, MD-MBA Program at Dartmouth; Professor and Chair of Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School & Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; Professor of Economics and Management,Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth & Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He is a member in the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine and has been profiled annually in Who's Who in America for 20+ years. He has been the recipient of several honorary degrees and has served on the board of directors/trustees of a number of foundations, corporations and universities - including at present the American University of Kosovo. For over 20 years he has served as a correspondent/member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Human Rights, and in 2007 was appointed to the National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine/National Research Council's Board on Children, Youth and Families which appoints and oversees all congressional &/or executive branch mandated studies relating to children, youth and families.

During the 1980's Professor Zubkoff was co-founder together with Drs. Tarlov, Ware, Greenfield, Nelson, and Perrin of the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) which developed the SF-36 and SF-12 patient reported functional status instruments. Professor Zubkoff was recipient of the Association for Health Services Research 1993 Article of the Year Award for two of the Medical Outcomes Study articles he co-authored on "Variations in Resource Utilization Among Medical Specialties and Systems of Care" and "Differences in the Mix of Patients Among Medical Specialties and Systems of Care," which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The faculty of Dartmouth's Department of Community and Family Medicine (CFM), which Professor Zubkoff has chaired since 1975, have had the largest sponsored research budget of any such department in the nation (annual budget of over $35 million - direct costs only - defined as PI's primary appt in CFM or multidisciplinary studies being managed by CFM), and were cited by the U.S. Liaison Committee on Medical Education for their "excellence in academic pursuits and community-based teaching...made all the more prominent by their wide ranging nationally recognized research programs." Included within CFM has been the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS), directed by Jack Wennberg, until its recent re-designation as the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI) under the directorship of Jim Weinstein. Within CFM/TDI, 7 full time Dartmouth faculty (Paul Batalden, Allen Dietrich, Elliott Fisher, C.Everett Koop, Jon Skinner, Jack Wennberg and Mike Zubkoff) and two part time faculty (Mae Jemison and Nils Daulaire) have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine.

Professor Zubkoff currently directs the MD-MBA Program at Dartmouth graduating 6-8 students per year, teaches courses on Medical Care Organization, Economics and Management in the Tuck School of Business's MBA Program and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice's MPH, MS & PhD Programs, and co-directs the 4th year required medical student course Health, Society and the Physician.

Dr. Eugene C. Nelson

Dr. Eugene C. Nelson currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Health Assessment Lab/Medical Outcomes Trust (HAL/MOT); and Professor of Community and Family Medicine and of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Dartmouth Medical School; Director, Population Health Measurement Program, The Dartmouth Institute; and Director, Population Health and Measurement, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Dr. Nelson is a national leader in health care improvement and the development and application of measures of quality, system performance, health outcomes, value, and patient and customer perceptions.

During the 1980's Professor Nelson was co-founder together with Drs. Tarlov, Ware, Greenfield, Perrin and Zubkoff of the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) which developed the SF-36 and SF-12 patient reported functional status instruments. Professor Nelson was recipient of the Association for Health Services Research 1993 Article of the Year Award for two of the Medical Outcomes Study articles he co-authored on "Variations in Resource Utilization Among Medical Specialties and Systems of Care" and "Differences in the Mix of Patients Among Medical Specialties and Systems of Care," which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Nelson and his colleagues at Dartmouth began developing clinical microsystem thinking. His work to develop the "clinical value compass" and "whole system measures" to assess health care system performance has made him a well-recognized quality and value measurement expert. He is the recipient of The Joint Commission's Ernest A. Codman award for his work on outcomes measurement in health care. Dr. Nelson has been a pioneer in bringing modern quality improvement thinking into the mainstream of health care, and helped launch the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and served as a founding Board Member.

He has authored over 150 publications and is the first author of three recent books: (a) Quality by Design: A Clinical Microsystems Approach, (b) Practice-Based Learning and Improvement: A Clinical Improvement Action Guide: Second Edition, and (c) Value by Design: Building and Improving Clinical Microsystems.