Care Help Desk Director

We are seeking an experienced Care Help Desk Director to lead a high-volume, enterprise support organization serving clinicians, care delivery teams, and business partners across Optum Health. This leader is accountable for reliable, responsive, and compassionate technology support that protects patient-care continuity and improves the provider experience. The ideal candidate combines operational discipline, strategic leadership, strong stakeholder partnership, and a demonstrated ability to transform service delivery through people, process, technology, automation, and actionable insights.

Primary Responsibilities:

People and Leadership: Build and lead a high-performing, inclusive leadership team and workforce. Establish clear accountability, develop talent, strengthen succession plans, and create the capacity and skills required to support evolving care-delivery needs.

Strategy, Partnership, and Communication: Define and execute the Care Help Desk strategy in alignment with IT Support Services and Optum Health priorities. Partner with clinical, business, technology, field-services, and vendor leaders to clarify ownership, anticipate demand, communicate performance, and resolve systemic issues.

Operational Excellence, AI, and Transformation: Own service quality, workforce readiness, knowledge management, incident and request performance, major-incident engagement, and continuous improvement. Embed responsible AI into daily work to reduce manual effort, accelerate analysis and resolution, improve knowledge access, strengthen decision-making, and create capacity for higher-value customer support. Use data, digital channels, automation, AI, and standard work to improve speed to resolution, first-contact resolution, customer experience, employee experience, and cost efficiency.

Day to Day responsibilities:

• Provide end-to-end leadership for Care Help Desk operations, including incident, request, access, and specialty-support services delivered through voice, chat, web, and other approved channels.

• Ensure timely, effective support for clinicians and care teams, with operating practices designed to protect patient-care continuity and minimize disruption.

• Lead a large, multi-layered organization through directors, managers, frontline leaders, employees, and strategic partners; set clear objectives and hold leaders accountable for outcomes.

• Establish workforce plans, staffing models, schedules, cross-training, and surge strategies that align capacity with demand, business growth, peak periods, and major technology events.

• Own service-level performance and operational health, including speed to answer, abandonment, first-contact resolution, resolution time, backlog, quality, customer satisfaction, and employee experience.

• Use trends, root-cause analysis, and voice-of-customer insights to identify recurring issues, prioritize corrective action, and influence upstream technology and process improvements.

• Strengthen knowledge-centered support by improving knowledge quality, adoption, governance, and feedback loops across the Care Help Desk and partner teams.

• Drive appropriate shift-left, self-service, automation, and AI-enabled support capabilities while maintaining effective assisted support for complex or patient-impacting needs.

• Integrate approved AI capabilities into daily leadership and frontline workflows, including ticket summarization and classification, knowledge discovery and drafting, trend analysis, quality review, workforce planning, communications, and action tracking, to reduce administrative work and accelerate informed decisions.

• Create a culture of AI fluency and experimentation by identifying high-value use cases, piloting solutions, training teams, measuring adoption and realized benefits, and scaling proven practices while ensuring human oversight, data protection, accuracy, transparency, and compliance with enterprise AI standards.

• Coordinate escalations and major incidents with technical teams, Field Services, application support, business continuity, and clinical stakeholders; provide clear and timely executive communication.

• Build strong operating relationships with Care Field Services, Level 2 support, infrastructure, applications, security, access management, and market or CDO leadership to ensure seamless handoffs and clear accountability.

• Lead readiness for acquisitions, integrations, launches, migrations, organizational transitions, and other changes affecting support demand, tools, processes, or customers.

• Manage vendor performance, contractual commitments, service levels, quality, risk, and corrective-action plans where services are delivered through external partners.

• Develop and manage budgets, forecasts, productivity plans, and cost-optimization initiatives while balancing service quality, employee capacity, and business outcomes.

• Maintain effective controls, documentation, audit readiness, security awareness, and compliance with enterprise policies and applicable healthcare requirements.

• Develop leaders and future successors through coaching, feedback, stretch assignments, performance management, and intentional career development.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in information technology, business, healthcare administration, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

• Progressive leadership experience in enterprise service desk, technical support, Information security, IT service management such as Incident and Service Request management, Change and Problem management, healthcare technology support, or a comparable operation.

• Demonstrated success leading large, geographically dispersed, multi-level teams in a complex and highly available support environment.

• Strong understanding of ITIL and ITSM practices, omnichannel support, workforce management, knowledge management, quality management, and service-level governance.

• Experience or a major proponent in project management, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and Transition and transformation.

• Ability to translate operational data and customer insights into decisions, priorities, executive communications, and measurable improvement plans.

• Demonstrated ability to apply AI and automation to everyday operations, lead adoption across diverse teams, and translate use cases into measurable gains in productivity, quality, speed, and customer experience while managing associated risks.

• Exceptional communication, collaboration, change-leadership, financial-management, and stakeholder-influence skills.

• Have led a global service operation operating 24x7 365 and teams in multiple geographies including the Americas

Required Skills / Experience:

• 10+ years of progressive IT support, service desk, or service-management experience, including 5+ years leading managers and multiple teams.

• Experience in managing multi-tenant, shared services with at least 5 clients in a service pod and directing an enterprise-scale support organization with 100+ employees

• Experience supporting clinicians, care-delivery operations, or highly available, customer-critical environment.

• Experience leading omnichannel support operations, including voice, web, chat, self-service, and Level 2 or specialty-support teams.

• Hands-on leadership experience with ServiceNow or a comparable enterprise ITSM platform, including dashboards, workflow, knowledge, and performance reporting.

• Demonstrated ability to manage customer relationships, daily service levels, vendors, budgets, operational risk, and executive escalations.

• Proven record of improving service outcomes through standardization, automation, workforce optimization, quality management, and continuous improvement.

• Demonstrated success developing leaders, building succession pipelines, and creating an accountable, engaged, customer-focused culture.

• Effective working in the US Day shift or PH night shift as primary operating hours.