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 here.
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
