Despite the immense health and economic needs of the time, the importance of a program like OTP is clear.
“I had concerns that our impact on healthcare workers or the restaurant workers would be small relative to the greater need of PPE, ventilators, and universal basic income. We still are very much secondary to those, but from the overwhelming response, it’s clear how far a warm, nutritious meal can go to soothe morale. And how empowering earning a wage for what you do well and love can be,” Natalie noted.
Natalie, who was born in Zhanjiang, China and was partially raised in Sweden and then the United States. Her parents, both researchers, inspired Natalie to pursue science. At Princeton University, where she received her undergraduate degree, she received the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for her research in infectious disease.
As her study of the healthcare system deepened, exposure to vaccine shortages and drug pricing incited Natalie’s fascination with the economics of healthcare. She spent her early career with Goldman Sachs and TPG advising and investing behind management teams of hospitals, insurers, and biopharma. These experiences gave her insight into how balancing mission and profits can both conflict and converge within organizations that affect millions of lives.
Central to Natalie’s work is the recognition that the effective collaboration of physicians, innovators, and business leaders is critical to transforming how we care for our healthy and our sick. Her hope is to accelerate the delivery of the next generation of healthcare innovation by leveraging both the compassion of human experience and the objective power of data-driven inference. ∎