Dr. Blike is an anesthesiologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and he is a professor of Anesthesiology and Community Family Medicine in the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College. He received his MD from University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and completed his residency in anesthesiology at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He has been at Dartmouth since 1992. He received his Masters in the Science of Health Care Delivery from the Tuck Business School and The Dartmouth Institute in 2015. He served as the Patient Safety Officer from 2008-2012. He served as the inaugural Chief Quality and Value Officer (2012-2021). Dr. Blike led enterprise-wide efforts for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock system to continually improve the quality, safety, experience and value of care. He established and led the Value Institute, the division supporting both clinical quality improvement and operational excellence including applied systems engineering and implementation/healthcare delivery science. He was also instrumental in establishing the Patient Safety and Training Center at D-H that opened in the fall of 2008, a state-of-the-art simulation training facility and center for innovation in systems engineering. He is also responsible for directing many of the quality measurement and reporting activities that drive the enterprise strategy.
Dr. Blike’s research and clinical practice career has been devoted to creating patient safety in complex, high hazard domains. He has performed applied human-factors research to help improve the safety of pediatric procedural sedation and reduce the risk of pain management in the hospital due to opiod induced respiratory depression. He recently served as the Principal-Investigator on a major AHRQ P30 grant to establish a Patient Safety Learning Lab focused on reducing Failure to Rescue Events. This work was associated with implementing and optimizing continuous monitoring systems designed to detect and respond to serious but treatable complications. This work demonstrated that deaths caused by Opiod Induced Respiratory Depression can be virtually eliminated in hospitalized patients using appropriately configured surveillance monitoring systems.
His many professional associations and leadership position in the past includes board membership of the Foundation for Anesthesia Education Research, President of the Society for Technology in Anesthesiology, being a founding member of the International Society for Medical Simulation, Research Committee of the National Patient Safety Foundation, Chair of the Board of the Vermont Program for Quality in Healthcare, and Chair of the New Hampshire Foundation for Healthy Communities.
