Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) has named Serena H. Chao, MD, MSc, as the inaugural chief of the newly-created section of geriatric medicine. Chao will assume her new role on June 23.
Chao comes to DHMC from Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, where she has been on faculty since 2016. She currently serves as chief of the division of geriatrics, where she oversees the Program of All-Inclusive Care of the Elderly (CHA PACE), house calls program, nursing home program, and was instrumental in expanding clinical services for the growing 65+ patient population.
From 2004 to 2016, Chao held a number of key leadership roles in support of medical education in geriatrics at Boston Medical Center (BMC), including serving as core faculty in the Chief Resident Immersion Training in geriatrics program and the director of the geriatric ambulatory rotation in the internal medicine residency program. From 2009 to 2015, she was director of the BMC/Boston University School of Medicine Geriatric Medicine Fellowship Program.
Chao attended medical school at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and earned a master’s of science in epidemiology from the Boston University School of Public Health. She completed a residency in internal medicine at UMass-Chan Medical School Baystate, where she also served as chief resident, followed by a fellowship in geriatric medicine at BMC. She is a fellow of the American Geriatrics Society.
About Dartmouth Health
Dartmouth Health, New Hampshire’s only academic health system and largest private employer, serves patients across New England. Dartmouth Health provides access to more than 2,300 providers in nearly every area of medicine, delivering care at its flagship hospital, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, NH. Its network of hospitals, outpatient centers, clinics and home care facilities, spans a broad geographical area. Year after year, DHMC is named the #1 hospital in New Hampshire by U.S. News & World Report, and is consistently recognized for high performance in numerous clinical specialties and procedures. Dartmouth Health includes Dartmouth Cancer Center, northern New England’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers and one of less than than 60 total nationally; Dartmouth Health Children’s, which includes the state’s only children’s hospital (Children’s Hospital at DHMC/CHaD) and more than 20 locations around the region; eight member hospitals in Lebanon, Keene, Claremont, Hampstead, and New London, NH, and Windsor and Bennington, VT; Dartmouth Health Home Care; Dartmouth Health Connected Care Center for Telehealth, serving patients as far away as Texas; and more than 30 primary and multi-specialty clinics across New Hampshire and Vermont. Through its partnership with Dartmouth College, Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the White River Junction VA Medical Center, Dartmouth Health trains nearly 400 medical residents and fellows annually and performs cutting-edge research and clinical trials with international impact. Dartmouth Health and its more than 16,000 employees are committed to serving the healthcare needs of everyone in the communities it serves and to providing every patient with exceptional, state-of-the-art, personalized care. Learn more at dartmouth-health.org.