Susan Dentzer

Susan Dentzer is the President and Chief Executive Officer of America’s Physician Groups, the national organization of more than 300 physician practices that provide patient-centered, coordinated, and integrated care for patients while being accountable for cost and quality. The approximately 195,000 physicians, along with other clinicians, working in APG member organizations provide care to 90 million patients, or one in four Americans.

Ms. Dentzer is a highly respected health care and health policy thought leader. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine); an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance; and a fellow of the Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research institute. She serves on the Executive Council of the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (HCP-LAN), the public-private partnership created to speed adoption of alternative payment models in U.S. health care. She is a frequent speaker and author of commentaries and analyses in print publications such as Modern Healthcare, NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine)-Catalyst, the American Journal of Public Health, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. She was also the editor and lead author of the book Health Care Without Walls: A Roadmap for Reinventing U.S. Health Care, available on Amazon.com.

Ms. Dentzer joined APG as President and CEO in March 2022. From 2019 to February 2022, Dentzer was Senior Policy Fellow for the Robert J. Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University. Based in Washington, DC, where the center’s research team was located, she focused on aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic response; health system transformation, such as through telehealth; biopharmaceutical policy; health coverage expansion, and other key health policy issues. From 2016 to 2019, Dentzer was President and Chief Executive Officer of NEHI, the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization then composed of more than 80 stakeholder organizations from across all key sectors of health and health care. From 2013 to 2016, she was senior policy adviser to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy focused on health and health care in the United States, and before that, was the editor-in-chief of the policy journal Health Affairs.

A longtime journalist, she was the on-air Health Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour from 1998-2008. Dentzer wrote and hosted the 2015 PBS documentary, Reinventing American Healthcare, focusing on the innovations pioneered by the Geisinger Health System and spread to health systems across the nation. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, focused on U.S. and global health policy, in 1986-87. She also held a U.S.-Japan Foundation Leadership Program Fellowship, which took her to Japan in 1991 to study the rapid aging of the populations and the implications for health care, long-term care, and aging policy in that nation.

Dentzer previously chaired the Board of Directors of Research!America, which advocates on behalf of biomedical and health-related research and innovation. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of the International Rescue Committee, a leading global humanitarian organization, and now serves on IRC’s Board of Advisors. She was formerly a member of the board of directors of the Public Health Institute, a nonprofit organization addressing public health issues and solutions nationwide. She is a member of the Boards of Advisors for the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy and the Philip R. Lee Institute of Health Policy Studies at the University of California-San Francisco. From 2011 to 2017 she was a public member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Medical Specialties, which assists 24 medical specialty boards in ongoing physician evaluation and certification.

Dentzer graduated from Dartmouth and holds a master’s in health care delivery science from Dartmouth as well. She is a trustee emerita of the college and chaired the Dartmouth Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2004. She serves on the advisory board for the Center for Global Health Equity at Dartmouth and previously was a member of the Board of Advisors of Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine for more than two decades. Dentzer holds an honorary master’s degree from Dartmouth and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Muskingum University. She and her husband, Charles Alston, have three adult children.

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