Director, Service Design, Healthcare Practice Operations & Innovation

Our team members are at the heart of everything we do. At Cencora, we are united in our responsibility to create healthier futures, and every person here is essential to us being able to deliver on that purpose. If you want to make a difference at the center of health, come join our innovative company and help us improve the lives of people and animals everywhere.

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…