An Interview with David O’Malley, SVP for Product Strategy

In May of 2021, David O’Malley joined VNSNY in the newly created position of Senior Vice President for Product Strategy. He comes to VNSNY from General Electric Healthcare, where he served in various product development related roles, most recently as Senior Director of product strategy for GE Healthcare’s digital technology group. Prior to that, David managed technology development for MediFit, a company that provided businesses with health and wellness solutions for corporate employees.

Welcome to VNSNY! Besides being a product development expert, we understand that you also have a background as a hands-on healthcare worker.

Thank you, I’m delighted to be here! That’s right, I was a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician in Connecticut for seven years. The nursing profession has also been a constant in my life – my wife is a nurse, and both my mother and grandmother were also nurses. Coming to VNSNY has put me even closer to that world of direct care than I was at GE Healthcare, which I am very excited about.

What is your vision for the organization as head of VNSNY’s new Product Strategy Group?

One of our key roles will be to advance VNSNY’s growth agenda through the introduction of new products that support the organization’s mission. This involves evaluating market opportunities to determine what product areas we want to prioritize, and implementing a framework for exploring, designing and delivering new products in these areas. In addition, besides our own product initiatives, another goal is to promote a culture of innovation across the organization.

Since VNSNY is a healthcare organization—as opposed to, say, a consumer goods company or a car manufacturer—who will our customers be?

Consumer goods and cars are all great examples of consumer-focused products where those companies create for, and market directly to, consumers. This model is known as business-to-consumer, or B2C. A large part of our focus, on the other hand, will be on creating products that drive value to other healthcare organizations that serve complex and vulnerable populations. This model is known as business-to-business, or B2B. The fundamentals are the same as the business-to-consumer or B2C model—we will create offerings that satisfy market needs and deliver promises through our products—but the audience, delivery and operational models will be tailored to very specific businesses, not mass-market individuals. The products we bring to market will leverage both our expertise and our purpose to further our mission of improving the healthcare experience for the most vulnerable amongst us.

With that in mind, what product areas will you be focusing on?

One of VNSNY’s priorities is to help make behavioral health services a more available and integral part of people’s health care. In support of that goal, we will be focused on working with VNSNY’s Community Mental Health Services (CMHS) to develop various behavioral health products to serve individuals with serious mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders. We are also collaborating with VNSNY’s new Management Services Organization (MSO) to create products they can use in their work supporting health plans and other organizations. More broadly, we are looking at different technology solutions that can drive positive impacts for consumers, including packaging the algorithms our data analytics team has developed in a way that can help home healthcare organizations positively affect the value of care delivery to their patients.

Can you update us on any specific products in the pipeline?

Sure. We are currently developing a substance abuse product for CMHS, to name one. We are also adapting the MSO’s HELPS tasking tool, which uses an evidence-based algorithm to determine home care needs, to offer on the commercial market. We anticipate launching a product for the MSO that supports their management of Medicare’s hospice value-based insurance design model for Medicare Advantage plans.

Is the plan to create these products in-house, or partner with other companies to develop them?

It will be a mix. We are certainly looking to develop innovative products on our own, but there is also a lot of value in leveraging today’s very active startup market through strategic partnerships. This is an evolving market. COVID has accelerated many pre-COVID trends that were pervasive in our society. Home health care is no exception to this, and it is a very active market with an influx of investment recently. Unlike most startups, however, we have vast experience and history in this industry, with access to actual data that we can use to drive product design. With VNSNY’s infrastructure and operations, we can quickly learn whether a potential partner’s innovation meets the needs of our organization, and we can also determine what changes might be required to make a product viable and scalable.

You mentioned that your goals include promoting a culture of innovation at VNSNY. Can you explain that?

Let me start by noting that an innovation can be something very simple—it doesn’t always have to involve inventing the iPhone. With that in mind, we want to drive and support a culture of innovation within VNSNY, by giving people the tools and techniques to explore innovative ideas on their own. We also want to help people learn to explore these ideas quickly, so they can learn what works and what doesn’t without expending valuable resources. The recent Impact Challenge, championed by Dan Savitt and the VNSNY Board of Directors, is an example of an initiative that we want to support in this regard. I believe the best innovations can come from absolutely anywhere. Someone with a fresh set of eyes is often able to look at problems in a different way, and see solutions other people don’t—and that’s what we want to encourage.