Dr. Blackwelder serves in the senior leadership team of Duke Health’s corporate strategy office, leading the application of health and market insights to Duke’s clinical enterprise strategy, as well as supporting the health system’s many service lines and clinical departments. With expertise built across 30 years of acquiring, curating, and analyzing healthcare delivery data, he empowers Duke’s missions to discover, teach, and deliver quality care to patients in the rapidly growing Southeast region and beyond.
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. He conceptualized and led foundational technical work toward the realization of Duke Health’s operational digital twin and built a novel Technology Partnerships executive, leading Duke Health’s efforts to create new partnerships with software-, AI-, and medical device-focused organizations outside the Duke enterprise. These partnerships provide mutual economic value while improving the quality and efficacy of patient care.
He also serves on the faculty of Duke University Fuqua School of Business as Adjunct Professor and as Visiting Professor in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business at Elon University, where he advises on program and curricular design. Dr. Blackwelder received his PhD in quantitative sociology from North Carolina State University.