Kevin Donnelly

President at Digital Health Innovation Advisors

Chicago, United States

Mr. Donnelly has a track record of driving exceptional results in both public and private companies. He has extensive experience as an executive, board member and entrepreneur in medical devices, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, software, clinical data management, and quality. His corporate resume includes Procter & Gamble, Cardinal Health, Inc., Baxter International, American Hospital Supply Corporation, and Safeguard Scientifics.
He is currently the President of Digital Health Innovation Advisors with a focus on accelerating transformational innovation and growth in healthcare. DHI works with clients on several fronts: expansion strategy in the North American market, digital Innovation, academic tech transfer, capital formation, board leadership and interim management. Select clients and projects include:
• academic tech transfer of a molecular diagnostics platform
• academic tech transfer for a data and analytics platform for neurointensive ICU
• North American strategy for a British deep tech company
• Board leadership for an EU based digital health platform for neurodegenerative diseases
• Capital formation for a SaaS based terminology and interoperability solution
• Advisory for a CDC certified virtual Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP)
Mr. Donnelly was the first CEO & Executive Director of The PCPI Foundation, a multi-stakeholder organization focused on driving improved health outcomes through the advancement of measurement science, quality improvement and clinical registries. The foundation was spun out of the American Medical Association stewarding over 90 clinical measures of performance used in government and commercial reimbursement programs and quality improvement efforts.
He has led the turnaround of two online education companies; as CEO of 4Medapproved a provider of content and online education to the healthcare industry focused on the adoption of electronic health records and health IT, and American Physician Institute an ecommerce provider of online and live medical board review courses for physicians and other allied healthcare professionals
Mr. Donnelly was recruited by the College of American Pathologists to establish SNOMED-CT as the leading multilingual machine-readable medical terminology for use in electronic health records and clinical applications around the world.
In order to expand country wide adoption beyond the United States and England, he convinced the CAP board that SNOMED-CT had the potential to be a global standard and the barrier to adoption revolved around the fact that it was proprietary, fully owned by the College. Working with a leader from the National Health Service in England, he recruited 5 countries to form an international standards organization, placed in Copenhagen, Denmark and then sold the standard into the organization creating free use for any member country. Today SNOMED CT has been adopted by 46 member countries and forms the basis for ICD-11 in collaboration with the World Health Organization, providing clinical and administrative needs built for digital applications.
In creating the organization, he worked extensively with Ministries of Health around the world, including the European Commission, public/private partnerships such as Canada Health Infoway and the European Space Agency, international standards organizations including ISO, HL7, DICOM, The World Health Organization, and hospital systems including the National Health Service in the UK and Hong Kong Hospital Authority as well as technology vendors. He provided thought leadership presentations in numerous international venues on semantic interoperability, representation of clinical data in electronic applications and health system change. He has written extensively on the subject and serves as a peer reviewer for publications.
At the College of American Pathologists, he was Principal Investigator on a Center for Disease Control grant that created interoperable synoptic reports for cancer registry reporting, converting three demonstration states from paper to electronic reporting. The CAP also led the development of open source distributed modeling system for medical terminology development by trained clinicians and informatics experts around the world. He was also responsible for maintaining ANSI accreditation as a standards development organization.
Before joining SNOMED Terminology Solutions and the College of American Pathologists, Mr. Donnelly was Vice President of Healthcare at Alliance Consulting Group, in Chicago, Illinois, where his practice focused on providing technology solutions in areas of Disease Management, Specialty Pharmacy, Healthcare Services and Insurance
Mr. Donnelly is the co-founder of Business Logic Corporation (now Next Capital) a venture backed software and services company where he served as Chief Operating Officer. He was responsible for daily operations of the company founded in 1996. Responsibilities included raising $26M in venture capital and management of sales, finance, software development, and professional services. He was Secretary/Treasurer of the corporation and member of the compensation committee. Joined company as employee number nine and gained co-founder status. Managed a team of 120. Clients included major mutual funds, banks and pension systems including T. Rowe Price, ABNAmro, Northern Trust and Citibank.
Mr. Donnelly was recruited to Cardinal Health as Vice President and General Manager with full P&L responsibility for $1.1 billion in revenues. He had oversight for multiple facilities with 250 employees and seven direct reports at the VP and Director level for the companies’ pharmaceutical distribution business. He led the consolidation of five Cardinal Health facilities with various operating systems in to one highly automated operation fulfilling 65,000 pharmaceutical order lines per day for the four State Midwest Region.
Mr. Donnelly spent thirteen years at Baxter International as an operating executive in field and staff positions in Chicago, New York, and Nashville. He led process reengineering and development of SAP R/3 ERP system across all customer facing domestic operations including 85 locations generating $8.5B in revenue.
Mr. Donnelly serves on several healthcare advisory boards, mentors health IT startups and is a frequent speaker and writer on healthcare transformation and information technology. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife. Mr. Donnelly holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Available For: Advising, Authoring, Consulting, Influencing, Speaking
Travels From: Chicago, Illinois
Speaking Topics: Digital Health Transformation, Healthcare Interoperability, Scaling Healthcare Start-ups