Background

Dr. Fisher is a professor of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine at the Dartmouth Medical School, and Director of Health Policy Research at Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. He is also co-director of the VA Outcomes Group, a research and training program for physicians, at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont. Dr. Fisher received his AB from Harvard University, his MD from Harvard Medical School and his MPH from University of Washington.

Dr. Fisher has broad expertise in the use of Medicare databases and survey research methods for health system evaluation. His research interests lie in three areas. He has worked to clarify the limitations of administrative databases and develop methods to overcome them. He has also developed approaches to resource allocation based upon the principles of benchmarking, initially as a means of addressing inequities in the levels of hospital resources across communities in Oregon and more recently as applied to the U.S. physician supply. Most recently, he has focused on the health implications of the uneven distribution of health care resources. His current research, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, examines the potential adverse consequences of increasing capacity in health care.

Dr. Fisher publishes in professional journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine. Some of his more recent publications include "Variations in the Longitudinal Efficiency of Academic Medical Centers," Health Affairs, 2004; and "The Implications of Regional Variations in Medicare Spending," Annals of Internal Medicine, 2003.