Wennberg Distinguished Professor and Chair of Health Policy and Clinical Practice
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice
Amber E. Barnato, MD, MPH, MS is the John E. Wennberg Distinguished Professor and Director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She is a physician-scientist trained in public health and preventive medicine, health policy research, and hospice and palliative medicine. A practicing palliative care physician, Dr. Barnato’s research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of variation in end-of-life intensive care unit (ICU) and life-sustaining treatment use among seriously ill older adults. She uses an array of scientific methods, including claims data analysis, participant observation and interviewing, high-fidelity simulation experiments, and randomized behavioral trials. Her work increasingly focuses on the interplay between organizational norms, provider-patient communication, and implicit cognition, and how these phenomena produce racial disparities in end-of-life treatment. Dr. Barnato has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2003, has been the Principal Investigator or Project Leader of more than 25 extramurally funded awards, authored more than 190 peer-reviewed publications, and mentored more than 70 pre-doctoral and post-doctoral scientists. As part of her public advocacy work, Dr. Barnato oversees the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care and collects and shares stories from diverse family members regarding their experiences making life-support decisions for patients in the ICU at the website www.ICUStoryWeb.org. Her newest curiosity is how psychedelic assisted therapy could change the paradigm of medical practice, both by offering novel pathways for treating mental health conditions and existential distress associated with life-threatening illness, and by ameliorating the trauma the health care delivery system on clinicians, thereby increasing their capacity for compassion, empathy, and trust in their patients’ capacity for self-healing.
RPD205 - Identification of Behavioral Outcomes for Implicit Bias Mitigation Interventions
Thursday, March 5, 2026
2:30pm - 4:00pm PST
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose