Matthew B. Mackwood, MD, MPH, a family medicine physician at Dartmouth Hitchcock Clinics Heater Road in Lebanon, was selected to participate in the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
This prestigious career development award supports junior faculty from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. With this award, Mackwood will work under the mentorship of Elliott S. Fisher, MD, MPH, a professor of medicine and health policy at The Dartmouth Institute and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and Jonathan Skinner, PhD, a research professor in the department of economics at Dartmouth College, on a study identifying best practices for leveraging telehealth in primary care to address inequities in access to care, focusing on rural populations across the United States. He will then conduct a prospective study implementing these best practices in our local and regional context in partnership with the Northern New England CO-OP Practice and Community Based Research Network.
In addition to his research and clinical work at Heater Road Primary Care, where he has worked since 2018, Mackwood is co-director of the “Patients & Populations” course at Geisel.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, Mackwood has been been involved in telehealth operations and increasingly in telehealth research, with an emphasis on outpatient telehealth. His research interests primarily focus on how telehealth is being used in primary care and the ways telehealth positively or negatively affects health disparities in accessing care. Recently, Mackwood’s research has been focused on a variety of national and regional health services research questions around how telehealth and similar technology can be used to enhance the accessibility and quality of care for populations that have historically struggled to access high quality primary care.
The Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program was created to increase the number of faculty from historically disadvantaged backgrounds who can achieve senior rank in academic medicine, dentistry, or nursing and who will encourage and foster the development of succeeding classes of such physicians, dentists, and nurse-scientists. Four-year postdoctoral research awards are offered to physicians, dentists, and nurses who are committed to developing careers in academic medicine and to serving as role models for students and faculty of similar background.
About Dartmouth Health
Dartmouth Health, New Hampshire’s only academic health system and largest private employer, serves patients across New England. Dartmouth Health provides access to more than 2,300 providers in nearly every area of medicine, delivering care at its flagship hospital, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, NH. Its network of hospitals, outpatient centers, clinics and home care facilities, spans a broad geographical area. Year after year, DHMC is named the #1 hospital in New Hampshire by U.S. News & World Report, and is consistently recognized for high performance in numerous clinical specialties and procedures. Dartmouth Health includes Dartmouth Cancer Center, northern New England’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers and one of less than than 60 total nationally; Dartmouth Health Children’s, which includes the state’s only children’s hospital (Children’s Hospital at DHMC/CHaD) and more than 20 locations around the region; eight member hospitals in Lebanon, Keene, Claremont, Hampstead, and New London, NH, and Windsor and Bennington, VT; Dartmouth Health Home Care; Dartmouth Health Connected Care Center for Telehealth, serving patients as far away as Texas; and more than 30 primary and multi-specialty clinics across New Hampshire and Vermont. Through its partnership with Dartmouth College, Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the White River Junction VA Medical Center, Dartmouth Health trains nearly 400 medical residents and fellows annually and performs cutting-edge research and clinical trials with international impact. Dartmouth Health and its more than 16,000 employees are committed to serving the healthcare needs of everyone in the communities it serves and to providing every patient with exceptional, state-of-the-art, personalized care. Learn more at dartmouth-health.org.