The Incubator is a joint venture between Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health (D-HH) that was established in 2019 to support the development of innovative health care delivery solutions. The Incubator’s primary goal is to provide rapid, scalable, and transformational redesign of health care services for populations experiencing serious illness.
By bringing together clinical leaders from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health and Geisel School of Medicine along with experts from multiple disciplines at Dartmouth College, the Incubator supports projects that:
Advance quality improvement of the services delivered to patients
Reduce spending on unnecessary, ineffective, or unwanted interventions
Advance scholarly work to further expand Dartmouth’s leadership in health care delivery through design, implementation, and dissemination of health care delivery redesign projects
Competitively-selected teams will spend 12 months developing and testing health care delivery interventions at D-HH that are designed to improve serious illness care experiences for patients, family members, and providers.
The Incubator will guide teams through a four-stage process that draws from the disciplines of human-centered design, innovation science, and change management. The process helps teams to understand the experience from the patient’s perspective, frame the problem rigorously, design a suite of innovative solutions, rapidly implement and test solutions, and evolve the redesign idea for local sustainability and dissemination to other settings.
The Incubator provides teams with structured support to accomplish transformational health care redesign, including: funding for protected time and project materials; dedicated office space within DHMC Lebanon; project management, research, IT, and analytics support; education based in principles of human-centered design; mentorship from leaders at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health; and facilitated access to subject matter experts and community partners across disciplines and industries.