Health 2049: Dr. Norma Padron, CEO of EmpiricaLab
Jason Helgerson co-hosts the Health 2049 podcast with Bisi Williams of the Massive Change Network.
Dr. Norma Padron is a health care economist who has taken an interest in the role technology can play in advancing our health care delivery system. She has worked across both academic and health care settings to best understand how new ideas and enabled technology can help us arrive at a healthier future. In this episode, she explores why technology-first solutions are appearing in specialty care first and the challenges facing our current and future workforce.
Norma is a Latina, first-gen, PhD health economist. She has held leadership roles across the healthcare industry including in academia, nonprofit and private sector leading teams that leverage data analytics and technology in the spaces of digital health, population health, value-based care model design and quality and performance measurement and training.
In addition to her work in digital health, Norma has held board positions in education and technology including as Chair of the industry advisory board of the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center, CHOT (Center for Health Organization Transformation); Secretary of the Board for Consilium Bots, a technology company focused on higher education in Latin America, and the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Alumni Board.
After working with multiple early stage digital health companies for the last few years in her prior role, she came to understand one of the most pressing barriers to scale health tech and data analytics in healthcare is the lack of investment in the development of the healthcare workforce. She recently launched EmpiricaLab to change that. EmpiricaLab is a platform focused on peer learning and last mile training for healthcare teams.
She earned a Ph.D. in health policy and management (economics track) from Yale University, a master's degree in economics from Duke University; a master's degree in public health from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain; and a bachelor's degree in economics and math from the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley.
