Manager of Operational Innovation

Job Description

At UC Health, we're proud to have the best and brightest teams and clinicians collaborating toward our common purpose: to advance healing and reduce suffering.

As the region's adult academic health system, we strive for innovation and provide world-class care for not only our community, but patients from all over the world. Join our team and you'll be able to develop your skills, grow your career, build relationships with your peers and patients, and help us be a source of hope for our friends and neighbors.

UC Health is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

The Manager of Operational Innovation serves as the dedicated function responsible for continuously advancing UC Health's operational capabilities in the face of rapidly evolving technology, analytics, and operational intelligence tools.

Anchored within the System Operations Command Center, this role identifies high-impact opportunities to improve or redesign operational management across core functions such as patient flow, intake & demand management, resource utilization, workforce operations, support logistics, system communications, incident command, and related cross-domain operational control processes.

The role assesses the operational management stack, translates operational needs into scalable solutions, and drives pilot-to scale implementation to improve core command center & adjacent operational management functions, aligns them to the right capabilities, and drives implementation through measurable operational results.

Responsibilities

Strategy & Structure:

• Continuously assess healthcare and cross-industry trends for emerging operational capabilities, including predictive analytics, AI-enabled tools, digital twins, real-time optimization, workflow automation, and orchestration solutions designed to support key operational capabilities such as patient flow, workforce operations, capacity management, and related operational domains

• Maintain a holistic view of the operational technology stack. Partner with Digital Health and operational leadership to recommend the optimal mix of Tier 1 platform expansion (Epic, Foundry, core enterprise systems) versus Tier 2 specialized capabilities, avoiding tool proliferation while closing real capability gaps in areas

• Recommend where operational needs should be met through better design, workflow, optimization, or expanded use of existing enterprise platforms, and where additional specialized systems or tools are needed to address capability gaps.

• Evaluate the applicability of emerging capabilities to UC Health's operational environment, with focus on flow, capacity, staffing, resource utilization, and operational control.

• Help define and maintain a coordinated roadmap aligned with organizational priorities and frontline operational realities.

Use Case/Solution Pipeline & Governance:

• Manage, with the Digital Health teams, an intake pipeline and triage process related to of use cases related to core operational processes, including functional requirements gathering, platform review assessments (Epic vs. Palantir Foundry vs. other Tier 1/Tier 2 systems), and scoring/prioritization against system strategic priorities

• Maintain escalation paths for cross-domain capability conflicts and prioritization disputes.

Use Case Delivery:

• Manage with key stakeholders the end-to-end lifecycle for operational AI and advanced analytics use cases for operational management processes: discovery, scoping, prioritization, build coordination, deployment, adoption, and value measurement

• Help to translate complex operational workflows, operational pain points from frontline operations, clinical stakeholders and strategic priorities into pilot-ready solutions, workflows, tools, and structured functional requirements that technical teams can build against within the appropriate technology (EHR Analysts, Informatics, Data & Analytics)

• Apply performance improvement, operational redesign, project management, and implementation methods to move initiatives from concept to pilot design, testing, iteration, validation, and scale-up of the new operational capabilities.

• Develop and maintain a documented end-to-end methodology covering use case intake, prioritization, scoping, requirements, build coordination, deployment, adoption, and value capture.

• Build and maintain standardized templates for the artifacts produced at each stage, including intake forms, functional requirements documents, stage-gate review packets, deployment readiness checklists, and value capture reports

Financial Stewardship & Value Realization:

• Support development of business cases and value hypotheses for proposed operational capability investments.

• Define leading and lagging performance indicators for each active use case, tied to system north-star metrics.

• Build and maintain an operational innovation value capture framework that quantifies ROI, cost avoidance, and efficiency gains from deployed solutions

• Monitor implementation progress and operational impact using pre- and post-implementation measures.

• Produce quarterly Operational Innovation reports for the COO and Chief Digital Health Officer summarizing pipeline status, deployed tool performance, adoption metrics, and value captured

• Partner with Finance to validate financial impact claims and ensure defensibility of reported outcomes

• Recommend continuation, redesign, scale, or discontinuation of pilots based on operational performance and ROI.

Cross Functional Coordination:

• Coordinate across Digital Health leadership (Data & Analytics, Informatics, Data Integration, EHR Analysts, IT PMO) to ensure operational use cases align with data infrastructure, platform architecture, and system security requirements

• Establish and maintain documented interaction mechanisms with each critical partner function, including digital health (EHR, analytics, integration, informatics), clinical and support operations, business management, and finance. Each mechanism defines cadence, decision rights, handoffs, shared artifacts, and escalation paths.

Team Leadership:

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of analysts, engineers, consultants, and project managers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and capability development.

• Set team priorities and allocate workload across the active use-case portfolio; remove barriers and develop staff toward increasing autonomy.

• Establish role definitions, performance expectations, and development plans for each team member, and conduct performance evaluations.

• Build the function's talent model and succession plan as the operational innovation capability scales.

• Establish and maintain documented interaction mechanisms with each critical partner function, including digital health (EHR, analytics, integration, informatics), clinical and support operations, business management, and finance. Each mechanism defines cadence, decision rights, handoffs, shared artifacts, and escalation paths.

Other Duties as assigned

Qualifications

• Minimum Required: Master's Degree - MBA, Health Informatics, Information Systems or MHA. Preferred: Clinical degree (MSN, DNP, PhD, MD, DO, PharmD, MPAS).
• Minimum Required: 7-10 years of progressive experience in healthcare or healthcare operations, with scope and complexity within an acute care hospital or multi-site health system.
• Demonstrated experience driving cross-functional operational improvement initiatives that produced measurable results.
• Experience translating operational problems into technology- or analytics-enabled solutions in partnership with technical teams.
• Preferred: Experience partnering with digital health, clinical informatics, or data science teams on technology-enabled operational transformation.
• Hands-on experience scoping or co-developing applications, dashboards, or analytical models with engineers or technical collaborators.
• Exposure to operational innovation practices from adjacent industries (e.g., manufacturing, logistics, aviation, defense).
• Experience with command center, transfer center, capacity management, or centralized operations functions.