Pulmonary and Critical Care Physician and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College
Lara Goitein, MD is a pulmonary and critical care physician and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She is System Medical Director for Clinician-Directed Performance Improvement (CDPI) for Dartmouth Health System, supporting physicians conducting quality improvement throughout the organization, and is the lead instructor for the CDPI Training Program. She directs the Dartmouth Health System approach to preventable inpatient mortality reduction in its seven hospitals. She leads an initiative by the system quality department to assess and make recommendations for redesign of quality improvement methods and infrastructure across the Dartmouth Health System.
Before joining Dartmouth, Dr. Goitein implemented and directed Clinician-Directed Performance Improvement at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in New Mexico, where she was also President-elect of the medical staff. Dr. Goitein’s approach to empower frontline clinicians to improve the systems in which they work has gained national attention: she was one of 30 speakers invited to present initiatives at the IHI/NPSF Patient Safety Congress in Boston in May of 2018, and has published in Health Affairs about CDPI. Based on her work in quality improvement and physician engagement, she participated in the National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders Forum in 2023.
Dr. Goitein trained at Harvard Medical School, did her residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and did her Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship at University of Washington, Seattle. She received an AHRQ National Research Service Award to study burnout in resident and faculty physicians at University of Washington. She is a graduate of the Intermountain Advanced Training Program in Healthcare Delivery Improvement. She is on the editorial board for JAMA Internal Medicine and also writes for the lay press, including a book titled, “The ICU Guide for Families: Understanding Intensive Care and How You Can Support Your Loved One” (Rowman & Littlefield, Dec 2021), and an article in the New York Review of Books titled “Training Young Doctors: The Current Crisis.” Her professional interests include improving health quality, organizational strategy for clinical management and value analysis, the role of the organized medical staff in quality, physician professional well-being, communication with patients and families, and graduate medical education.