Karina has worked closely at the side of GGC’s CEO over the past 2 years—a period of unprecedented growth, expansion, and well-documented impact of the SMART™ model as a best practice model. Her engineering background fuels her extraordinary abilities. She is an expert at identifying data metrics, data collection, assessment and reporting on health care interventions, utilization rates, as well as staff training on Results Online/ethosRx, which is the SMART™ data collection system. Her role has grown since Ginn Group’s acquisition of the Results Online System, and she now not only manages the system for the SMART™ model, but she also manages external customers by providing technical assistance and training.
Karina met Melanie when she was selected by the Hispanic Heritage Foundation (HHF) to participate in the First Annual CVS Health and HHF Latinos On Fast Track (LOFT) Symposium hosted by CVS Workforce Initiatives in Woonsocket, RI, in November of 2014. After the Symposium, Melanie invited Karina to attend a flu immunization event in Chicago, IL, at the CVS-sponsored Kilmer-Sullivan SMART™ Student Health and Wellness Center. The more Karina learned about Melanie’s innovative collaboration with CVS Health, the more she fell in love with the model, especially because of the significant impact that this work has in the lives of many young children and adolescents. In June of 2015, she joined Melanie’s team as a Health Research and Programs Manager supporting School-Based Health Care innovations and was simultaneously named a CVS Health – Hispanic Heritage Foundation fellow, supporting multi-cultural health care access for at-risk populations. Her role has evolved since then, and she is now the Director of all GGC data and research initiatives.
Additionally, Karina has teamed up with Ginn and GGC’s Senior Evaluation Advisor, Andrew Gluck, MBA, on their work to customize Gluck’s economic impact methodology, Expected Value-Return on Investment (EV-ROI) and applying it to the interrelated connections between health, education and workforce development effort and outcomes. Her expertise in establishing processes and databases to collect the real-time level of data required for EV-ROI analysis has enhanced the methodology’s capacity to serve as a crucial decision-making tool for management.
Karina is originally from Caracas, Venezuela. She moved to the United States after graduating from high school. During her undergraduate studies, she worked for almost a year as an intern in the Clinical Engineering Department at HeartWare, Inc. In addition, Biomet, Inc. sponsored her capstone senior design project, which resulted in the first prize award during the Senior Design Project Competition at Florida International University (FIU). In 2013, she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering from FIU.
Upon graduation, Karina was awarded the Florida-Georgia Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Bridge to the Doctorate Fellowship, a program funded by the National Science Foundation, to pursue her graduate studies. As a graduate student, she participated in a summer internship with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, where she was awarded the NRL Outstanding Graduate Oral Presentation Certificate of Achievement. In 2015, she received her Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from FIU.
Karina is very proud to have recently become an American citizen, and she is very excited about her role with GGC and CVS Health. She is also thrilled about the opportunity it has granted her and continues to offer her to learn and to contribute to such important work in developing health care delivery channels that will help people of many cultures on their path to better health, education, and a better life.
