Who We Are

Eric Isselbacher, MD, MHCDS
Founder & Director

Eric Isselbacher is the Founder & Director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He completed both his medical residency and cardiology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1996 he joined the staff of the Cardiology Division at Mass General. Dr. Isselbacher is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is motivated to innovate by the fact that healthcare providers today are stretched to the limit, if we hope to improve the efficiency, quality, and experience of healthcare, it can’t be by working harder or faster. It will have to be by a willingness to break with tradition and embrace the science of innovation.

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Paula McCree
Managing Director

Paula McCree is Managing Director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab. Motivated by her desire to be part of a team that creates innovative solutions in healthcare that work, she brings her passion and interests to settings where she can facilitate the process through which innovation in healthcare can have an impact on how services are delivered and received. Her experience in a variety of healthcare settings developing new products and designing new programs gives her a unique perspective and understanding of innovation in the healthcare delivery system. Paula holds a BS in Biological Anthropology from Harvard and an MS in Nutrition from Tufts. Influenced by her training as a yoga instructor and stress management and resiliency program facilitator, she brings a mindful perspective to organizational development and creates purpose driven work environments where people bring their best selves and innovation flourishes.

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Jared Conley, MD, PhD, MPH
Associate Director

Jared Conley is an emergency physician and innovator at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.  His focus is on employing the science of innovation and the enabling power of digital technologies to enhance the quality and affordability of acute healthcare. Through his fellowship in healthcare delivery innovation at Stanford University and continued work at the Healthcare Transformation Lab, he hopes to work with others in leading a revolution in care–for the benefit of individual patients and populations.  He has completed a joint MD/PhD program at Case Western School of Medicine with an emphasis on healthcare organization and policy, as well as received a MPH from The Dartmouth Institute. His clinical training was obtained at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital.

Victoria Vacaro
Innovation Manager

Victoria Vacaro is an Innovation Manager with the Healthcare Transformation Lab. Victoria graduated from Boston College with a BA in Film Studies, focusing on screenwriting and film production. While working at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute as a Program and Marketing Coordinator, Victoria got the knack for planning and running events while researching and integrating people-centric, time-saving tech solutions. Victoria is motivated to innovate by the desire to democratize processes, to open people up to new ways of thinking, and to help give people greater control over their own healthcare experiences.

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Jennifer Mann
Innovation Manager

Jennifer Mann is an Innovation Manager with the Healthcare Transformation Lab. Jennifer holds dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She also holds a Master of Engineering degree in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University. During her graduate program, Jennifer developed a keen interest in medical device product development and innovation management strategies. Since graduating, she has devoted the focus of her career to bringing innovative healthcare technologies to market and into the hands of patients and caregivers. Prior to joining the Healthcare Transformation Lab, Jennifer worked at a boutique technology consulting firm where she counseled med-tech companies on new product development, innovation strategy, and IP portfolio management.

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Aaron Aguirre, MD, PhD
Cardiologist, Clinical Affiliate

Aaron Aguirre is a cardiologist and critical care specialist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School a clinical affiliate of the Healthcare Transformation Lab. He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and his doctoral degree in electrical and biomedical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He trained in internal medicine, cardiology, and critical care at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Aguirre’s graduate work focused on the development of high-resolution optical imaging methods and catheter technologies for clinical applications, and he has significant experience in the creation and preclinical validation of novel medical devices. His current research at the MGH Center for Systems Biology utilizes innovative molecular imaging and microscopy techniques to investigate the biology of myocardial infarction (heart attack) and related forms of heart disease.

Amy Dickey, MD
Fellow in Healthcare Innovation

Amy Dickey, MD is a Healthcare Transformation Lab Fellow in Healthcare Innovation and an instructor in the Pulmonary and Critical Care Division of the MGH Department of Medicine. She is passionate about adapting and applying technologies for use in porphyria, a family of rare genetic diseases affecting the production of heme. Her interest in porphyria arises from personal experience, as she personally has erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP). This disease causes painful sensitivity to light but currently has no FDA-approved treatments. Her innovation project focuses on developing and applying technologies to provide quantitative endpoints for clinical trials in EPP. For this project, she was recently awarded a Spark Grant from the MGH Medicine Innovation Program. In addition to being an HTL fellow, she is also a Protect the Future Trainee of the American Porphyria Foundation, a program designed to train the next generation of porphyria specialists.

Numa Perez, MD
Fellow in Healthcare Innovation

Numa Perez, MD, is a 2018-2019 Aetna Foundation Fellow in Healthcare Innovation with the Healthcare Transformation Lab, and the 2018 Claude E. Welch Research Fellow in the Department of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Numa spent his childhood in El Salvador before coming to the United States and joining the U.S. Marine Corps where he worked as an Avionics Technician of the CH-53E Helicopter. From there, he moved onto college and worked as a Research Engineer at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. This diverse background in technology and system design, combined with his Surgical training at MGH, have prepared him well to tackle issues that lay at the intersection between healthcare innovation, outcomes and disparities. Numa’s goal is to rethink and redesign the entirety of the perioperative patient experience, while leveraging technology to make it streamlined and more patient-centered, thus leading to improved patient satisfaction and postoperative outcomes. While hoping to enhance quality for all, Numa’s goal is to simultaneously bridge the disparity gap that affects so many patients at MGH and around the nation. Numa graduated with his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. Outside of work, Numa enjoys spending time with his wife Rachel, his daughter Olivia, and his son Numa III.

Andrew Chu, MD
Fellow in Healthcare Innovation

Andrew “Andy” Chu, MD is a Fellow in Healthcare Innovation with the Healthcare Transformation Lab. He is passionate about transforming healthcare through the use of digital health solutions and care delivery, with special emphasis on developing technologies that improve the longitudinal care, patient-provider experience, and clinical outcomes of patients from high-risk, underserved communities. He is currently a resident physician in the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency (HAEMR) program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Andrew earned his MD at Boston University School of Medicine and his MPH at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. For his prior work in digital health and innovation, he is grateful to have received the American Medical Association Leadership, Massachusetts Medical Society Scholars, and the ECRI Health Devices Achievement Awards. Outside of work, Andrew loves to spend time with his wife, Halim, and dog, Birdie.

Erik Reinertsen, MD, PhD
Innovator in Residence

Erik is an innovator-in-residence at the Healthcare Transformation Lab, and a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT and MGH in the Cardiovascular Research Center and Clinical Data Animation Center. He builds deep learning algorithms to read ECGs, predict cardiovascular emergencies from physiological data, and phenotype shock. Previously Erik interned at Takeda Ventures and co-founded a non-profit to help startups launch pilots at Emory and the VA. His graduate work focused on signal processing and machine learning on data from wearable devices. He holds an MD from Emory, a PhD in biomedical engineering from Georgia Tech, and a BS in bioengineering from UCLA.

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Jocelyn Carter, MD, MPH
Hospitalist, Clinical Affiliate

2017-2018 Aetna Foundation Fellow in Healthcare Innovation

Jocelyn Carter, MD, MPH is a 2017 Aetna Foundation Fellow in Healthcare Innovation with the Healthcare Transformation Lab.  Clinically prepared in preventive medicine, internal medicine and leadership at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Dr. Carter is passionate about experiential learning, scalable and cost-efficient initiatives, outcomes research, and healthcare information technology driving the redesign of patient-centered care in healthcare innovation. She is an active member across the MGH community, serving as the MGH Center for Diversity and Inclusion Manager of Trainee Affairs, and on the Department of Medicine’s Albright Medicine Service and Internship Selection Committee in addition to being a practicing internal medicine hospitalist. A recent awardee of a 2017 Partners Healthcare Center for Population Health Delivery System Innovation Implementation Grant, Dr. Carter and her team are studying the impact of patient-community health worker pairings upon hospital discharge on health care outcomes in high risk populations. She is an editor of the Society of Hospital Medicine Clinical Quick Talks and is a regular reviewer for esteemed academic journals.

Alyssa Donovan
Communications Designer

Alyssa is a senior Communication Design student at Massachusetts College of Art, with experience in research, development, and marketing. After interning for a non-profit, Alyssa felt compelled to pursue a career where her designs could make a meaningful difference. Now, at the Healthcare Transformation Lab, she is driven to improve the healthcare system for both patients and providers through thoughtful and engaging work.

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Halim Chu
Software Engineer

Halim Chu is a fullstack software engineer with the Healthcare Transformation Lab. She enjoys building web-based and mobile apps that improve the delivery of care to high-risk patient populations, with a particular interest in mental health conditions. After several years of studying code on her own, she attended the Grace Hopper program within Fullstack Academy of Code in New York City. During her time at Grace Hopper, she was part of a team that built a web-based app that tracks and predicts the user’s mood using machine learning. She graduated from University of California, San Diego with a BA in Psychology.

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Yanik Bababekov, MD, MPH
Surgical Resident, Clinical Affiliate

2017-2018 Aetna Foundation Fellow in Healthcare Innovation

Yanik J. Bababekov, MD, MPH, is a 2017 Aetna Foundation Fellow in Healthcare Innovation with the Healthcare Transformation Lab and the Marshall K. Bartlett Surgical Research Fellow in the Department of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. A surgical resident at MGH, Dr. Bababekov works with a multi-disciplinary team aiming to bridge health services research with healthcare innovation and has been recognized as Top 40 under 40 Healthcare Innovator by MedTech Boston. Dr. Bababekov received a BA in Neuroscience from Middlebury College and earned medical and public health degrees from Tufts University School of Medicine. He enjoys exploring the outdoors with his wife, Lindsay, and daughter, Noa.

Dora Tao
Innovation Extern

Dora Tao is currently a Master of Public of Health student at the Harvard TH Chan School of public health. Prior to graduate school, Dora has worked in non-profits and hospitals, where she realized that system changes would need to be made in order for healthcare to become more accessible. She is motivated to be part of the Healthcare Transformation Lab to challenge physicians and clinical staff to think differently about innovation and how we can use these innovations to change the healthcare system.

Ariya Kraik
Innovation Extern

Ariya Kraik is an innovation intern at the Healthcare Transformation Lab and will graduate in May 2020 with an MPH degree from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Ariya previously worked as a clinical nurse at Penn Medicine, initially caring for acute medical transplant patients, and then later in the OR as a scrub and circulating nurse specialized in cardiac, vascular, and transplant surgeries. She holds a degree in Healthcare Management from The Wharton School and a BSN from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is passionate about improving the quality and affordability of health care and exploring the potential for innovation and transformation of health care delivery to provide superior care to patients.