The Levy Incubator is a joint venture between The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice (TDI) and Dartmouth Health (DH) 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.

By bringing together clinical leaders from Dartmouth Health and Geisel School of Medicine along with experts from multiple disciplines at Dartmouth College, the Incubator supports projects that:

  • Improve the patient experience by developing and testing interventions at DH to improve care experience(s) for patients, family members, and providers
  • Prioritize a patient-focused approach by ensuring alignment between patient goals and the medical care they receive
  • 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

Our Process

Competitively-selected teams will spend 12 months developing and testing health care delivery interventions at Dartmouth Health that are designed to improve 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. Our 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.

Incubator Services Provided

The Incubator provides teams with structured support to accomplish transformational health care redesign, including:

1. Funding
Selected teams will receive funding to execute their projects and to buy out team member time, up to 8 hours per week (0.2 FTE).

2. Dedicated Space within Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center – Lebanon
A space designed for teamwork and collaboration in the Williamson Translational Research Building which includes individual workstations and meeting space.

3. Staff and Student Support
Chosen teams will be provided with dedicated personnel, including:

  • Project Management, Research, and Administrative Support
  • IT Support (application development, EMR integration)
  • Data Analytics and Clinical Informatics Support
  • Assistance with Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis for Intervention
  • Support from Dartmouth Students (Graduate, Undergraduate, and Medical Students)

4. Education
Teams will be guided through a curriculum designed to foster innovation that is based on the principles of human-centered design.

5. Mentorship
Mentors will be assigned to each team and will provide them with guidance and support throughout their time in the Incubator. Mentors are influential leaders and scholars from:

6. Access to Subject Matter Experts
Teams will be connected with Subject Matter Experts in areas such as Change Management, Health Care Evaluation Methods, Qualitative Research Methods, Cost/Revenue Calculation, etc., with expertise spanning from:

7. LeAP: Levy Accelerator Program
LeAP will support the academic productivity of Levy Incubator teams whose health care delivery innovations show promise for broader scaling and implementation within the Dartmouth Health system, and where feasible, into externally-supported implementation and evaluation efforts, including comparative effectiveness evaluations. LeAP is directed by TDI Professor Glyn Elwin, MD, PhD, MSc. LeAP supports teams after the initial year of funding ends.