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Chief Revenue Officer for Largest Flexible Spending Account Store on the Web

About the Company

Approximately thirty-five million Americans are covered by a flexible spending account (FSA) and each year, our client estimates that consumers collectively forfeit over $400 million back to employers because they don’t deplete their flexible spending accounts (FSAs).  The client operates an online shopping website for FSAs which are employer-based programs that allow consumers to set aside tax-free dollars to purchase medical products and services – from band-aids to smoking cessation programs and tens of thousands of products and services in between.

 

Our client is the only one-stop-shop stocked exclusively with FSA-eligible products and services so there are no guessing games as to what is and is not reimbursable, a dilemma consumers face every time they walk into a drugstore. In addition to more than four thousand FSA-eligible products, the site offers a national provider database of FSA-eligible services and an FSA Learning Center. The biggest challenge to the consumer in capitalizing on the tax benefits of the FSA is sorting through the arcane rules of what is eligible and what is not.  Given how difficult this can be for the consumer to do, many FSA account balances simply languish until year’s end, and then revert back to the employer.

 

The company was founded on the idea that it should be easy and convenient for a consumer to use their FSA and recently launched site enhancements, even in the face of recent eligibility changes, which require consumers to obtain a physician’s prescription for many products in order to be reimbursed by their FSA.

 

The Company has unequalled expertise in flexible spending account eligible products & services. FSA’s offerings include the following:

 

PRODUCTS: Baby care products, cold and allergy, diabetes care, digestive health, elastics/athletic treatments, eye/ear care, family planning, feminine care, first aid, foot care, home health care, oral care, pain relief products, skin care, smoking deterrents, and vitamins/dietary supplements.

 

SERVICES: The Company also provides services in the areas of primary care, cancer, heart health, radiology, mental and behavioral health, surgery, pathology, orthopedics and sports medicine, and women’s health services, as well as ear, nose, and throat.

 

The company was founded in 2010 and is based in New York, New York.

 

About the Position

 

Reporting directly to the Founder & President, the Chief Revenue Officer will play a senior leadership role overseeing all revenue generation for the company, holding leadership responsibility for a team of three to seven (plus), covering both online and offline marketing, merchandising, business development, and partner sales.

 

Responsible for the overall topline, the CRO will recommend appropriate strategies, tactics, and operational initiatives to continuously build measure and enhance revenue opportunities for the Company. The CRO will provide vision and leadership for each of the three major revenue legs— online acquisition, offline channel partnerships, and marketing/public relations initiatives–  specifically driving the Company’s consumer brand awareness and ubiquity.

 

This role will also work closely with Operations to close, onboard, and drive partner program effectiveness.  The CRO will also work in concert with Engineering to optimize UI, UX, merchandising, and retention.

Reporting directly to the President, the Chief Revenue Officer shall:

•  Successfully lead and manage a sales and e-commerce team of three to seven staff
•  Be responsible for hiring, training, measuring, and motivating the team
•  Building new and expanding existing partnerships with third-party administrators and other channel partners to drive program adoption and execution
•  Drive online marketing excellence in search engine optimization, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, online social awareness (e.g., Twitter, blogs, Facebook) with single-minded goal of revenue growth and optimization
•  Travel when needed to meet key partners and partner prospects to establish, develop, and maintain those relationships, including the management, expansion, and renewal of multi-year partner contracts
•  Manage short- and long-term staff planning, recruitment, performance management, work assignments, training, mentoring, career development, and recognition or disciplinary actions
•  Set up processes for project team selection, resource loading, KPIs, etc.
•  Own and drive overall budgeting, forecasting, and performance measurement against goals
•  Be responsible for business planning and proposals, operating budgets, and financial terms/ conditions of contracts for all revenue channel partners.

The successful candidate must also have the ability and experience to lead a multi-disciplined organization.

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VP Client Services & Engagement Management for Online Consumer Community Changing the Face of Healthcare

This executive search is for a private equity-backed, revenue-generating, 7-year-old high-growth company that represents the next generation in healthcare innovation—PatientsLikeMe brings together patients in e-communities who create insights on their diseases and treatments by sharing information that improve their conditions.  At the same time, these insights bring value to large pharma and biotech companies, influencing the way they develop and deploy drugs.  With more than 100,000 registered consumer patients, PatientsLikeMe re-balances the healthcare system, ultimately returning power to the patient.

BSG Team Ventures is  retained to identify the VP of Client Services.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the Vice President of Client Services will play a senior leadership role within the management team, overseeing all client project scoping, management and delivery.

MORE COMPANY DETAIL:

The roots of the company are anchored in one of three brothers who developed ALS, a neuromuscular disease that ultimately proves fatal.  Ben and Jamie wanted to do all they could to help their brother Stephen, and—leveraging their prior career experience and entrepreneurial leanings—decided to try to help their brother gain insights from other patients with ALS in order to improve the understanding of how the disease progresses and what might be done to ease and improve one’s condition.  And so was born PatientsLikeMe, a health data-sharing platform.  The Heywood family’s fight to save Stephen has been chronicled in the book His Brother’s Keeper as well as the documentary “So Much So Fast.”  For more, preview an interesting short video piece on their story athttp://www.patientslikeme.com/about.

THE ROLE

This position will be responsible for the overall success of all commercial client engagements including those with pharma, payers, providers, and other related healthcare NGOs.

In addition, as the key liaison between PatientsLikeMe and the business customer,  the VP of Client Services will be responsible for driving key account relationship development, deepening the understanding of the customer’s needs with an eye to expanding PatientsLikeMe’s strategic role in providing data and analytics to further the customer’s knowledge of patients, conditions, outcomes, and insights.

Below is a bubble diagram outlining  key career & functional attributes critical to success for this role:

Specific responsibilities:

  • Drive PatientsLikeMe project scoping during project definition and contract development and execution phases.
  • Manage the engagement estimating function in order to drive , pricing consistency, accuracy, and profitability from engagement to engagement.
  • Coordinate overall internal project management across R&D, analytics, and technology development
  • Create and manage internal and external delivery timelines.
  • Communicate, in tandem with PatientsLikeMe business development staff, project progress against timeline, scope changes, and other periodic updates.
  • As necessary, build and lead client services function by hiring, motivating, and managing internal teams assigned to specific projects.
  • Lead the budgeting and execution of all client services-related activities.
  • Manage external third-party partnerships engaged to help deliver on PatientsLikeMe client related projects, including consulting firms, valued-added resellers, or other strategic engagement or delivery partners.
  • Work closely with internal business development, leadership & engineering resources, knitting together collaborative and energized cross-functional project teams.
  • Qualifications & Experience

  • Prior successful experience in a client engagement and delivery leadership role in the broadly defined healthcare consulting and/or healthcare data & analytics industry.
  • A strong understanding of the overall business frameworks of PatientsLikeMe customers, including pharma, biotech, healthcare payers & providers, and government & medical & health research and academic organizations.
  • Successful experience in an entrepreneurial, growth-stage corporate environment of less than 100 employees.
  • Success in scaling organizational and functional processes related to client engagement management that balance the drive for efficiency, innovation and creativity.
  • An unusual combination of proven analytical ability with strategic business savvy
  • B.A. or B.S. required; M.B.A. or other advanced degree strongly preferred
  • Skills & Personal Characteristics

  • Defined by others as smart, capable, hands-on, energetic, and someone who possess a strong entrepreneurial spirit.
  • A client ombudsman with outstanding strategic and conceptual thinking skills. Someone who is able to adjust rapidly to changing market conditions and new opportunities.
  • A strong, assertive personality, able to make a creative contribution and build buy-in for ideas, as well as integrating with the ideas of others
  • VP Product for Online Consumer Community Changing the Face of Healthcare

    This executive search is for a private equity-backed, revenue-generating, 7-year-old high-growth company that represents the next generation in healthcare innovation—PatientsLikeMe brings together patients in e-communities who create insights on their diseases and treatments by sharing information that improve their conditions.  At the same time, these insights bring value to large pharma and biotech companies, influencing the way they develop and deploy drugs.  With more than 100,000 registered consumer patients, PatientsLikeMe re-balances the healthcare system, ultimately returning power to the patient.

    BSG Team Ventures is  retained to identify the VP of Product, an expert in e-community consumer acquisition, engagement, and retention.  With current pharma customers like Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi-Aventis, the Company’s goal is to grow to 2+ million registered users in the next several years.   This role will lead consumer online acquisition, experience & engagement, serving as the internal voice of the consumer.

    MORE COMPANY DETAIL:

    The roots of the company are anchored in one of three brothers who developed ALS, a neuromuscular disease that ultimately proves fatal.  Ben and Jamie wanted to do all they could to help their brother Stephen, and—leveraging their prior career experience and entrepreneurial leanings—decided to try to help their brother gain insights from other patients with ALS in order to improve the understanding of how the disease progresses and what might be done to ease and improve one’s condition.  And so was born PatientsLikeMe, a health data-sharing platform.  The Heywood family’s fight to save Stephen has been chronicled in the book His Brother’s Keeper as well as the documentary “So Much So Fast.”  For more, preview an interesting short video piece on their story at http://www.patientslikeme.com/about.

    The Role

    As VP Product, this consumer web expert needs to have the following 4 experiences as builder-leader:

  • Success in companies whose mission is to acquire & develop vibrant online B2C relationships with consumers who are drawn to affinity groups and online associations
  • Ownership & leadership of the entire consumer lifecycle and product roadmap, from acquisition through engagement & retention
  • Strong grow-it/scale-it-stage experience, having grown companies or divisions from at least $10M to 25M or more in revenues
  • Prior track record of recruiting A-caliber teams with the skills and experiences required to deliver a world-class web-based consumer experience
  • Companies that might be part of this executive’s career progress (although less likely their most current position) include horizontal social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), online affinity groups (Eons, Weightwatchers, sports fan communities like FanIQ, etc.), social commerce properties (BuyWithMe, Gilt, Groupon), or social gaming destination sites (Gamesville, Worldwinner, Zynga).

    Below is a bubble diagram outlining  key career & functional attributes critical to success for this role:

    General Manager: eTrinsic Division

    Untitled Document

    Position: General Manager, Simbionix eLearning

    Reports to: CEO, Simbionix USA

    Location: Denver, CO

    Website: www.simbionix.com

    “Virtual reality simulation in surgical training has become more widely used and intensely investigated in an effort to develop safer, more efficient, measurable training processes…If executed properly, virtual reality offers inherent advantages over other training systems in creating a realistic surgical environment and facilitating measurement of surgeon performance.”E. Seymour and J.S. Rotnes, Surgical Endoscopy (2007)

    “If we’re going to make a mistake, let’s make it on the simulators first.” - Dr. Karl Illig, Chief of Vascular Surgery at Strong Medical Center, Rochester, NY, on why physicians are eager to start using the new Simbionix PROcedure Studio simulator

    “If the learning actually matters, use simulations. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it.” - Clark Aldrich, founder of SimuLearn, industry visionary, and author of numerous articles and books on simulations and e-learning

    SIMBIONIX IN THE NEWS

    http://www.simbionix.com/News.html

    http://www.simbionix.com/PROcedure.html

    THE COMPANY

    Surgical simulators have been developed in the past few years to enhance the training of physicians, reduce the number of animals and cadavers, and provide flexible training scenarios and preoperative planning. Despite their potential benefits, and the fact that they have precedence in flight simulators, there are very few simulators in current use globally. Simbionix as a leadership company in this growing industry is changing the medical training landscape.

    As a world leader in the field of medical education and simulation technology, Simbionix offers the most comprehensive medical training experience available, using the latest software and hardware technology. The company’s state-of-the-art technology provides surgeons, interventionists, nurses, and technicians with a robust platform to learn and master critical skills to ensure procedural efficiency and promote quality patient outcomes. The systems offer a range of basic and highly advanced procedures, and incorporate detailed and complete metrics for skill assessment.

    The user is free to practice skills and perform procedures until the required proficiency is attained. In addition, difficult and uncommon procedures may be practiced at any time. This maximizes consistency to optimize learning, providing a clear advantage over relying solely on previous ly available patient training methods. More…

    One VC-backed CEO’s Lesson on Keeping your Friends Close, and your Enemies Closer

    Was having coffee with a CEO of a successful venture-capital-backed company in the Boston area the other day.  They’re in the healthcare IT space, and doing incredibly well, sales forecasts up, counter to many of the other growth-stage technology companies suffering through the recent economic emergency thrust upon most.

    We got to chatting about business development, and he brought up something I had rarely if ever heard before.  When it comes to the competition, he makes it a point to get to know them.  In fact, if there is a competitor that pops up he hasn’t talked to, he’ll ring them up.   As he’s CEO, he usually calls the other CEO (if he calls the head of sales, the competitor’s CEO might get the wrong idea).  “Just the other day, I heard about a company that hadn’t been in the mix before, and I called and left a message for the CEO saying that as we were both in the same industry, it would be good to chat and perhaps meet up for coffee.”

    When I asked my coffee companion the responses he got, he said they varied.  Sometimes, the other CEO doesn’t respond.  Sometimes they respond with a strong overtone of suspicion.   However, once they meet, he feels a lot comes out of these meetings.

    When I asked him when he started to do this, he referenced a global 2000 company he used to work for, and a customer review he had with his boss.  When his boss asked him about several specific competitors and our protagonist didn’t know them in the first-person, he vowed to forever more make it part of his SOP to reach out to the competition and meet up to learn more about them.

    When I asked him what were the biggest benefits of the practice, he pointed to three:

    •     Often competitors are pitching against each other at the same client prospect. Sometimes is valuable to compare competitive market intelligence, especially if the vendor is getting the feeling they’re being played with some disinformation.

    •     Ignorance breeds fear: if competitors don’t know each other, they’re much more likely to slip into badmouthing the other guy. If you get to know them, this is a lot less likely.

    •     Invariably, at some point one competitor may replace the other competitor’s technology. To be able to call the other party and have a bridge already built at senior levels can go a long way in the integration of the new technology, even if it’s a bitter pill for the one being replaced. “It just makes the whole changeover for the customer less painful.”