About Keynote Speaker Susan Dentzer

Susan Dentzer is a Visiting Fellow at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. Dentzer has been involved with the Center since its beginning as a member of the Duke-Margolis Advisory Board. As a Visiting Fellow, she will take on a larger role in supporting and contributing to the Center’s activities related to health care delivery transformation and biomedical innovation.  Dentzer will also participate in working groups and activities that support research on a number of initiatives in health care delivery and payment reform, biomedical innovation, and health reform education and workforce development. These activities will build on Dentzer’s important policy-related work, including the advancement of technology-enabled care models based in the community, improving maternal and infant health, and preparing for a new era of earlier-stage treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic illnesses.  She also will help raise the visibility of the Center and Duke faculty and enhance the dissemination of their research to maximize the impact on public awareness and policy.

A health policy expert and top-rated editor and journalist, Dentzer stepped down in February 2019 as the president and chief executive officer of the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, an organization that conducts research and promotes constructive change in health care. She served as editor-in-chief of the policy journal Health Affairs from 2008 to 2013, and was an award-winning on-air Health Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour for a decade. She is the editor and lead author of the book Health Care Without Walls: A Roadmap for Reinventing U.S. Health Care, a member of the National Academy of Medicine and Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow at National Academy of Social Insurance and the Hastings Center and a member of the Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice of the National Academies of Science, and serves on the Boards of Directors of the International Rescue Committee, Research!America, and the Public Health Institute.

Dentzer graduated from Dartmouth, is a trustee emerita of the college, and chaired the Dartmouth Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2004. She has served as a member of the Board of Overseers of Dartmouth Medical School for more than two decades. Dentzer holds an honorary master’s degree from Dartmouth and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Muskingum University.