DUHS Executive Director, Technology Partnerships
Stephen Blackwelder, Ph.D.
Dr. Stephen Blackwelder leads Duke Health’s efforts to create new partnerships with digital health software and artificial intelligence-focused organizations outside the Duke enterprise. Stephen reports in to the Chief Digital Officer for Duke Health, and closely partners with the Office of External Partnerships team to build broader and deeper engagement between Duke faculty and the digital health industry, entrepreneurs, and other innovators. These partnerships provide mutual economic value to Duke Health and the partner, nurture the exchange of creative thinking between Duke and the community, all toward improving the quality and efficacy of patient care nationally.
Dr. Blackwelder joined Duke in 2013 as the health system’s first Chief Analytics Officer, where he led the organization’s analytics transformation to become the first health system, globally, to be recognized by HIMSS as operating at the highest level of analytics maturity. Stephen has over 30 years’ experience leading and executing advanced analytics projects, 25 years of that experience in healthcare. He came to Duke from an innovative startup, subsequently acquired by Wake Forest Baptist Hospital, where as employee number five Stephen designed and led a team of developers to implement novel data and analytics solutions tailored to providers within value-based care reimbursement models. Stephen previously led health analytics at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina for more than a decade, ultimately serving as VP for clinical informatics.
Dr. Blackwelder also serves on the faculty of Duke University Fuqua School of Business as Adjunct Professor, where he teaches about the challenges inherent in analyzing clinical data, especially for use in AI-powered decision support, and draws on decades of experience to equip graduate students to overcome those challenges in the real world. Stephen’s research is focused on trustworthiness of AI in healthcare, specifically with regard to the effects of clinical data provenance upon training and constraining data corpora.
Stephen received his Ph.D. in quantitative sociology from North Carolina State University.