Chief Data and Strategy Officer | Louisiana Public Health Institute

Tom Carton is Chief Data and Strategy Officer and former Director of Health Services Research for the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI), where he leads multiple teams that conduct various types of health services research that span quality improvement and population health. As Principal Investigator of the Research Action for Health Network (REACHnet), he leads a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary team that is creating a regional informatics, patient engagement, and research infrastructure to efficiently conduct comparative effectiveness research. Both positions underscore the importance of collaborative work grounded in frequent communication, careful planning and budgeting, realistic research objectives, and mentoring within and beyond the organization. His research sits at the intersection of EHR-based disease surveillance and patient-centered, observational cohort studies and can generally be classified as population science – cutting across various topics in chronic and infectious disease. 

He has held multiple leadership positions within PCORnet (the national Patient Centered Research Network), including Chair of the PCORnet Steering Committee and leading or co-leading working groups on data linkage, health services and public health research, research innovations, and cross-network collaborative research. Locally, he is Executive Director of a community health information exchange, the Greater New Orleans Health Information Exchange, that aims to coordinate patient care across clinical, public services, and criminal justice domains while providing actionable data to members across sectors. Tom is also an Adjunct Professor in Global Health Systems and Development at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where he mentors pre-doctoral trainees in advanced statistical and econometric methods. 

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