Three new trustees elected to Dartmouth Health and Dartmouth Hitchcock boards

The Dartmouth Health Board, which provides governance oversight of the Dartmouth Health system, and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Boards of Trustees, which oversee Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) and Dartmouth Hitchcock Clinics, have elected a combined three new members. The newly elected trustees, all of whom were elected at the end-of-year 2025 meetings, began their terms January 1.

The new members are:

Dartmouth Health
•   Patrick J. Lanier, BA, president of the Health Management Academy (HMA)

DHMC and Dartmouth Hitchcock Clinics
•   James A. Heckman, MD, section chief of internal medicine at DHMC
•   Michael F. Rotondo, MD, FACS, CEO of the University of Rochester Medical Faculty Group

Lanier, who joins the Dartmouth Health board, oversees HMA’s convening, research, policy, and innovation partnership divisions, and leads finance, strategy, and new product development. HMA is a peer learning company that brings together leading health systems and industry innovators to address healthcare’s most complex challenges. Prior to joining HMA, Lanier was with the Advisory Board Company (ABCO), where he held several key executive roles, including leading the firm’s strategy and new product development group. He also served as the head of revenue for ABCO with responsibility for $600 million annually. In 2000, before joining ABCO, Lanier conducted clinical research studies in the department of neurosciences at Duke University.

Heckman, who joins the Dartmouth-Hitchcock boards, joined DHMC in 2021. A native of Weare, NH, he earned his medical degree from the University of Virginia School of Medicine and completed residency training in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, where he remained on faculty as a clinician-educator and physician leader. At BIDMC, his work centered on healthcare delivery redesign, team development, and improving clinician well-being, and in 2017 he was selected for the Linde Family Fellowship in Primary Care Leadership. Building on that experience, Heckman returned to New Hampshire to lead the section of general internal medicine at DHMC, where he has guided growth and transformation, spearheading positive culture change, advancing faculty development, and promoting innovative models of care. 

Rotondo, who joins the Dartmouth-Hitchcock boards, is a seasoned healthcare executive with an accomplished surgical career in academic acute care surgery. He leads an academic, multidisciplinary physician practice, University of Rochester Medical Faculty Group (URMFG), composed of 2,100 faculty in 22 core specialty areas and more than 135 sub-specialties. Collectively, this group performs more than 4 million ambulatory visits and procedures annually in central and western New York, and serves as upstate New York’s major tertiary and quaternary care center. Rotondo also serves as vice dean for clinical affairs at the University of Rochester (UR) School of Medicine and Dentistry; senior vice president of the University of Rochester Medical Center; and professor of surgery in the division of trauma and surgical care at UR. In 2017, Rotondo founded the UR Health Lab, a technology-oriented incubator where new ideas in digital health are explored by over 30 transdisciplinary investigators committed to innovation in healthcare delivery. The UR Health lab also functions as a venture lab for select strategically aligned tech companies. Rotondo attended medical school at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, residency trained in general surgery at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, and was the first traumatology and surgical critical care fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.