Director
Billy Nicolich is a product leader and applied behavioral economist in health care dedicated to reducing suffering and solving problems in the US health care system. He holds a Master of Health Care Innovation from the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine. For over a decade, he has contributed to the growth of iconic health care technology companies such as athenaHealth, Press Ganey, and Verisk Health. Currently, he works primarily as a product leader of health care surveys, outreach campaigns, and interventions with the goal of achieving greater levels of personal health care engagement among health plan members and patients in the US.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, his work has centered on overcoming vaccine hesitancy across the various segments of society with an emphasis on overcoming health disparities and helping segments of the population who are at risk and need help the most.
His emphasis is on applying the emerging research and evidence in the field on how best to craft the message and design interventions for maximum impact. His work has placed him at the forefront of how to best reach people through digital means - SMS/Text and IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) to extend beyond traditional phone, mail and other market research methods.
Billy is a founding member of the Society for Health Care Innovation, a society devoted to accelerating great ideas to solve problems in the health care system. He is also founder of the Health Care Nudge Coalition which brings together people who leverage behavioral insights in health care. He serves on the advisory board of Grassroots Labs, Inc., an emerging health care start-up working on reducing health plan non-adherence due to costs of lab tests, and solving last-mile problems that require diagnostic health lab tests.
Billy seeks to reverse the trend that technology too often interferes with the interactions between people in health care rather than facilitates those interactions. He recognizes the careful, nuanced approach that must be taken to let tech and data-centric solutions reduce friction and work seamlessly in the background so people can do their best work. Billy holds extensive experience and top-level industry certifications in transformation process innovation methods such as Kanban, Agile and Scrum. He seeks to continue making contributions in these areas.
