Stephen Plume, MD is Professor of Surgery and Professor of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire. He served the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center as chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery for twelve years until being named President of The Hitchcock Clinic in 1990, a post he held until joining the faculty of the Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth in 2000. His longstanding interest in systems of care and in outcomes research led to the 1987 founding, with Gerald O'Connor, of the Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group, a multi-center, multi-specialty consortium that studies practice variation in order to improve clinical outcomes for cardiac patients. This work, and some key recruitments, helped bring Dartmouth to a leadership position in healthcare improvement. A 1964 graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Plume received his medical degree from the University of Rochester in 1969, where he completed internship and residency in Surgery in 1975. He was then a Fellow in Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery at the University of Toronto for two years before joining the Hitchcock Clinic in 1977.