John Prince
President and Chief Operating Officer, Optum
John Prince was named president and chief operating officer of Optum in April 2021. In this role, he is responsible for driving Optum enterprise performance overall and overseeing Optum’s technology, digital, global operations and enterprise clinical capabilities and Optum Financial Services.
Previously, Prince served as chief executive officer of OptumRx®, guiding its evolution to become an industry-leading provider of pharmacy care services. He has held numerous roles with UnitedHealth Group since 2005, including executive vice president and chief operating officer of Optum; executive vice president and chief financial officer of Optum; the first chief operating officer of OptumHealth; and led the formation of OptumHealth Financial Services as its chief executive officer.
Prior to joining UnitedHealth Group, Prince served as senior vice president and head of health care business development and strategy at JPMorgan Chase and was a partner in Arthur Andersen’s health care strategy and operations practice.
Prince holds an undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics from Northwestern University, as well as an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
We serve 250,000 people each day, so that's 250,000 times we have a member on the other line, we're interacting with them personally. We're not just thinking about somebody who has a pharmacy medication. They also have a medical condition. We think about that whole person. Pharmacy is the biggest touch point to health care. And so we're obsessed around how do we make medications as affordable as possible for consumers so they can get healthy. Pharmacy is really retail. It's a personal experience that you can touch and feel on a retail basis often with lots of interactions. And so you've got to have a really different perspective of how you make that experience simple, seamless, and smart. And that's what we're focused on. And so it's both the design around all the touch points in health care, whether you're talking to somebody on the phone, interacting with digitally. We bring all the data together. The pharmacy data, the medical data, the behavioral data, in real time and give that to our care provider who is actually interacting with them, so that we can actually create the best outcomes from a personal perspective, from a health perspective, and from a cost standpoint. We have the right culture and the people and the capabilities. Each element of that is the diversity that takes to bring all those resources together to serve the health care system.
This is not something that we're going to do, to the health care system, we're going to partner with the various constituencies across health care to make it better.
We interact with our members on a personal level and understand them as a whole person, not just their pharmacy medication, so they receive the highest quality of care.
John Prince, President and Chief Operating Officer, Optum