Geisel Campaign
Improving Teamwork to Benefit Patients “We have proven that team-approach interventions work. The next step is to figure out how to make these interventions the routine way the organization operates.” Dick Levy
During nearly 50 years of working on the business side of healthcare, Dick Levy D’60 lamented the system’s inefficiency and waste—of both time and money—and his dismay motivated him to help fix those problems. “Healthcare is organized around specialty silos,” says Levy, retired CEO and chairman of Varian, a medical systems manufacturer. “People don’t work together as a team. I learned in business that teams work better to solve specific problems.” With that in mind, Levy and his wife, Susan, have contributed $3 million to the Susan and Richard Levy Health Care Delivery Incubator. As a collaborative venture between The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth Health, the Incubator supports multidisciplinary teams working on rapid-cycle development and testing of innovative ways to deliver efficient, timely, convenient, and less costly patient-centered care. Over the past three years, the Incubator has funded 10 projects—from redesigning the care of stable pre-term infants to improving the experience of elderly surgical
4 | Fall 2022 | Alumni News & Notes