Cool Job Alert: CareFirst’s Healthworx is growing an innovation team

Healthworx, the innovation and investment arm of health insurer CareFirst, is building out a team to drive medical technology towards the future, and work with businesses around the country to do so. Currently, the Canton-based team is hiring for a pair of open positions: innovation strategist and innovation lead.

“These roles are part of a fast-paced team working on some of the most high-impact problems, challenges, and unmet needs in healthcare,” said Arianne Graham, director of innovation at Healthworx.

Healthworx seeks to innovate around challenges and opportunities that are of strategic interest to CareFirst, which is the region’s largest health insurer, as well as its members and healthcare more broadly. It takes a team approach, as both of these newly-created roles will involve working as part of a small team, known as a “pod,” per the job descriptions. In turn, they will help to engage businesses, from the startup to later stage.

“Those hired will work on creating and pressure-testing a pipeline of solutions to address healthcare quality, equity, access and affordability, often creating new products and business models,” said Graham. “They’ll cover the entire innovation cycle, from research to design to concept to validation, including best practices of like user research, human-centered design, lean agile and rapid, iterative prototyping.”

Healthworx seeks candidates with three years of experience working in an innovation or product role. We asked Graham for thoughts on one thing that’s not in the job description that would help a candidate stand out.

“Everything we do is new and forward-thinking,” Graham said. “Our people are comfortable with the unknown and leading edge, and competent and confident enough to make predictions with high levels of efficacy.”

The growth of the team comes as Healthworx is opening new collaboration space at its Canton HQ and beginning a new cohort of its 1501 Health incubator program, which it formed in partnership with Baltimore hospital network LifeBridge Health.

Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.