About

Overview and Mission

The Institute for Digital Healthcare Transformation is a university-wide resource at UH. Established to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial healthcare solutions, the Institute unites faculty, students and staff from our technology-forward colleges, our health professions colleges, and others that can contribute through research in public policy, law, or business.

The Vision

The University of Houston Institute for Digital Healthcare Transformation will reshape healthcare access, quality and delivery through digital innovations that erase barriers to care and position UH at the forefront of data-driven transformations in our health system. 

About Our Executive Director

Beto López is the executive director of the Institute for Digital Healthcare Transformation at the University of Houston. He is an innovation leader who builds organizational capabilities that enable institutions to serve people who have historically been overlooked by traditional markets. 

López spent more than a decade at IDEO, a global human-centered design and innovation consultancy, where he rose to design director and global practice lead of systems design. He led multidisciplinary teams of researchers, engineers and designers across more than 100 innovation projects for Fortune 500 companies and public agencies, guiding projects through the full product and service development lifecycle. 

In 2015, López joined the founding executive team of The University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School, where he co-founded the Design Institute for Health, a collaboration between Dell Medical School and the College of Fine Arts and served as its managing director. He designed and launched value-based care models for Central Health, Travis County’s healthcare district, combining clinical and operational expertise with human-centered design. He also helped establish data-sharing partnerships and business associate agreements among healthcare systems and community-based organizations. 

López chaired the Service Integration subcommittee for the redesign of Austin State Hospital, where he helped develop Texas’ first coordinated brain health continuum, a framework used by public mental health organizations across more than 50 counties. 

In 2019, López left Dell Medical School to pursue entrepreneurial approaches to healthcare transformation. He co-founded three organizations: DesignRun.Org, a nonprofit that brings human-centered innovation methods to public health agencies; Design Run Group, a social venture studio; and Cura Health Fund, a mission-aligned venture capital fund.

 
As CEO of Design Run Group, López partnered with Legacy Community Health, a Houston-based federally qualified health center, to strengthen its innovation capacity through the COVID-19 pandemic. The partnership grew into a multi-year transformation of Legacy’s population health strategy, including the development and launch of digital health interventions and its first senior care service line. The work was grounded in community-based research and co-developed with Legacy’s clinical and operational teams from design through implementation. 

Through Cura Health Fund, López raised and deployed $3 million across technology-enabled health ventures focused on maternal health, aging and mental health. The portfolio includes artificial intelligence-enabled cancer navigation, Food and Drug Administration-cleared tele-sonography, remote maternal health monitoring and whole-person bereavement support. 

López holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, where he later served as an associate professor of practice at Dell Medical School and the College of Fine Arts. Raised on the Texas border, López brings a bicultural perspective to his work in healthcare innovation and transformation.