Director, Service Design, Healthcare Practice Operations & Innovation

Cencora is seeking an experienced service designer with healthcare operations experience to help drive operational innovation across the practices within its Management Services Organizations (MSOs). This is a newly created, high-visibility role, and you will partner directly with MSO leadership, practice physicians, and Cencora’s MSO Platform team to design solutions to complex operational challenges. Your work will help advance community-based healthcare across the country, making care more accessible and accelerating the delivery of new clinical therapies to patients.

The range of initiatives you will support is diverse and could include topics such as introducing new clinical therapies, customer and patient experience, revenue cycle management, patient retention, and staffing models. Work will span across different clinical specialties, currently including oncology and retina. All work will be deeply collaborative, ensuring solutions are grounded in clinician and patient needs, economically viable, and scalable across practices. This is an operational and design role, not a clinical or clinical-research position — you will help shape how care is delivered and experienced operationally, in collaboration with clinical leadership.

This is a lead level position that is part of a new and growing team. You will be expected to independently scope, plan, and execute engagements without close day-to-day supervision. Comfort and experience leading human-centered design engagements and interacting with senior leadership are critical for success.

• Partner with Cencora and MSO leadership — including senior executives — to prioritize and scope operational innovation initiatives.
• Independently plan and execute complex, sometimes ambiguous engagements end to end, from discovery through delivery, with minimal oversight.
• Map complex operational systems across clinical practices and MSOs to surface dependencies, root causes, and improvement opportunities.
• Conduct qualitative and quantitative research, including current-state journey mapping of patient, physician, and staff experiences to identify pain points and surface opportunities.
• Synthesize complex information into clear findings and recommendations.
• Ideate and explore possible solutions, including market scans of existing solutions as well as first principles ideation.
• Visualize, test, and refine concepts through diverse means of prototyping, gathering stakeholder feedback, evaluating off-the-shelf solutions, and using solution evaluation frameworks.
• Partner with platform, operations, technology, and clinical practice stakeholders, including designing and facilitating cross-functional workshops and working sessions.
• Build and deliver clear, persuasive presentations and other deliverables that communicate findings, solutions, and plans.
• Develop playbooks and toolkits that support scaled communication, adoption, and implementation of solutions across MSOs and practices.
• Maintain a shared repository of research findings, journey maps, and service blueprints to preserve institutional knowledge as the function grows.
• Help define the practices, tools, and standards for the brand-new practice support and operational innovation capability at Cencora.

• 8–10+ years of experience in service design, experience design, CX strategy, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated ability to independently scope and lead complex, ambiguous design engagements without close supervision.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in human-centered design methodology, design strategy, systems/ecosystem mapping, journey mapping, and related service design methods.
• Experience in healthcare operations — preferably physician practice management, medical groups, health systems, MSOs, or pharmacy — sufficient to engage credibly with clinical and practice leadership from day one.
• Strong workshop facilitation skills, including experience facilitating senior executives and other high-level stakeholders.
• Excellent research and synthesis skills, able to turn complex information into clear insight.
• Fluency in technology’s role in operations, and experience with tech vendor/solution selection.
• Business acumen to understand basic business financials and evaluate the economic viability of solutions, in partnership with the finance team.
• Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills, with the presence and polish to influence senior executive audiences.
• Comfort and flexibility working across varied problem domains (operations, patient/customer experience, retention, therapy launch, etc.).
• Willingness to travel regularly to MSO and practice sites.
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.

• Strong visual design skills, with the ability to produce concept visuals and also polished, presentation-ready visual deliverables.
• Prior experience mentoring, leading, or managing designers or researchers.
• Familiarity with revenue cycle management, patient access, or therapy commercialization.

What Cencora offers

We provide compensation, benefits, and resources that enable a highly inclusive culture and support our team members’ ability to live with purpose every day. In addition to traditional offerings like medical, dental, and vision care, we also provide a comprehensive suite of benefits that focus on the physical, emotional, financial, and social aspects of wellness. This encompasses support for working families, which may include backup dependent care, adoption assistance, infertility coverage, family building support, behavioral health solutions, paid parental leave, and paid caregiver leave. To encourage your personal growth, we also offer a variety of training programs, professional development resources, and opportunities to participate in mentorship programs, employee resource groups, volunteer activities, and much more. For details, visit https://www.virtualfairhub.com/cencora

Full time

$110,500 - 220,990

*This Salary Range reflects a National Average for this job. The actual range may vary based on your locale. Ranges in Colorado/California/Washington/New York/Hawaii/Vermont/Minnesota/Massachusetts/Illinois State-specific locations may be up to 10% lower than the minimum salary range, and 12% higher than the maximum salary range.