Matt Mackwood MED ’14, MPH ’13, D ’08, an assistant professor of community and family medicine, and co-course director of Patients and Populations at Geisel School of Medicine, has been selected to participate in the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
This prestigious research career development award supports junior 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.
Mackwood, a family physician working in primary care at Dartmouth Hitchcock Clinics Heater Road Primary Care, is the first Geisel faculty to be selected for the program.
“This program is important for giving someone like myself an opportunity to be represented and visible in academic medicine, and I’m excited to launch my career in a new way,” Mackwood says.
“I am appreciative of the many people who have supported me getting to this point—my colleagues who thought of me for this award, and who have been encouraging and supportive of me pursuing this. I hope I am not the last person at Geisel to benefit from this approach,” he says. “I plan to use this award to further encourage and support others within our institution.”
Under the mentorship of Elliott Fisher, MD, a professor of medicine and health policy at The Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and Jon Skinner, PhD, a research professor in the department of economics at Dartmouth College, Mackwood’s project seeks to analyze national data sources to identify best practices for leveraging telehealth in primary care to address inequities in access to care, focusing on rural populations across the U.S. He hopes to eventually launch a prospective study implementing these best practices locally and regionally in partnership with the Northern New England CO-OP Practice & Community Based Research Network.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mackwood has been involved in telehealth operations and increasingly in telehealth research, with an emphasis on outpatient telehealth. His research interests focus on how telehealth is being used 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.
“It would be nice to see primary care become more sustainable, equitable, and effective during my career—maybe I can move the needle a bit forward,” Mackwood says.
