CTO · CPO · VP Engineering
Scott Michael Willey
Technology executive building platforms, leading teams, and shipping products that matter — across healthcare AI, Silicon Valley startups, and Fortune 500 enterprises.
30+
Years Experience
5
U.S. Patents
100+
Team Members Led
3
Thought Leadership Awards
Background
About
I'm a technology executive with over three decades of experience spanning consulting, corporate enterprises, and Silicon Valley startups. My work sits at the crossroads of engineering leadership, product strategy, and healthcare innovation.
Currently serving as VP of Engineering & Product Management at Medecision — a wholly-owned subsidiary of HCSC (Blue Cross Blue Shield IL, TX, OK, NM, MT) — I lead a cross-functional team of up to 100 across the full product lifecycle, from architecture through delivery.
I've built and scaled teams from the ground up, held five U.S. patents in healthcare technology, founded a company that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt, and led enterprise-scale migrations to cloud and FHIR-based platforms. Whether I'm selling a concept to a board or diving into a system design, I operate with equal credibility on both sides of the table.
Domain Expertise
- ›Healthcare Clinical Delivery & Interoperability (FHIR)
- ›Agentic AI & Healthcare Automation
- ›Supply Chain & Market Platform Design
- ›Multi-tenant Cloud Architecture (GCP, AWS)
- ›Product-Market Fit & Go-to-Market Strategy
Location
Dallas, TX
Contact
scottmwilley@gmail.com
Industry Stage Appearances & Product Launches
Vizient Connections Summit
Aptitude
Las Vegas, NV
Won an internal innovation challenge and launched Aptitude — a supply chain analytics platform — at Vizient's national conference. Secured $10B in spend data within 12 months.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Groovice
San Francisco, CA
Launched Groovice publicly on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage after securing investment from NFX Guild and relocating operations from Dallas to Silicon Valley.
HIMSS
Lumynz
Las Vegas, NV
Launched Lumynz for Zynx Health (Hearst Health) at HIMSS — a cloud-based solution identifying variations in clinical practice and driving provider behavior change through evidence-based insights.
Medecision · HCSC
UM & Appeals Platform
Enterprise Launch
Built and launched Medecision's complete healthcare management suite — a full Utilization Management platform with AI Policy Management, Agentic AI, Fax AI, Appeals & Grievances, Provider Portal, and end-to-end FHIR interoperability. Serves 43 million lives across commercial and government health plans.
Philosophy
Innovation Philosophy
These are the frameworks that have most shaped how I approach product, engineering, and business strategy. Each one answers a question every platform builder needs to ask:
Synthesis
Innovation Philosophy
Scott's Perspective on Modern Innovation Systems
Across my experience working with innovation frameworks and strategy teams — including exposure to Lean Startup, Lean UX, Sprint, Ten Types of Innovation, and hands-on work with NFX — a consistent pattern becomes clear:
Innovation is not a creative activity. It is a system of speed, structure, communication, and defensibility.
Most organizations fail not because they lack ideas, but because they are structurally too slow to interpret, align, and act on those ideas.
The Core Failure Mode: Slow Understanding
The biggest constraint in innovation is not execution — it is interpretation. Even when strong ideas exist, they break down in translation: requirements become misaligned, intent gets diluted across teams, decisions are delayed through documentation, complexity hides real system behavior. This creates a gap between what is known and what is understood across an organization. That gap is where innovation fails.
Learning Must Be Faster Than Certainty
Modern innovation systems attempt to solve this through acceleration. Together, they represent a shift away from planning-based certainty toward learning-based execution. However, learning alone is not enough if organizations cannot act on it.
- ›Lean Startup focuses on rapid experimentation and validated learning
- ›Lean UX replaces assumptions with continuous user feedback
- ›Sprint compresses decision-making and testing into days instead of months
The Structural Constraint: Organizational Resistance
From The Innovator's Dilemma, a deeper constraint emerges: even when evidence is clear, organizations resist change due to existing incentives, customer alignment with current products, internal ownership and "territories," and structural dependency on legacy success. This creates a fundamental gap: organizations can learn faster than they can change.
Defensibility Determines What Matters
Not all innovation creates durable value. Network effects determine whether growth becomes temporary traction or structural defensibility. Different types — direct, indirect, data, marketplace — define how value compounds over time and whether a system becomes resistant to competition. Speed creates advantage, but defensibility determines whether it lasts.
Innovation Is a Portfolio, Not a Single Idea
From Ten Types of Innovation, innovation is not one thing — it is a system of choices across product, experience, business model, operations, and ecosystem design. Most organizations over-index on product innovation while ignoring higher-leverage structural changes. At an executive level, innovation becomes a portfolio allocation problem, not a creative one.
The Missing Layer: Communication Speed
Across all frameworks, one constraint appears beneath everything else: how quickly people can form a shared understanding of complexity. Tools like UML diagrams, data flow diagrams, and system architecture maps are not documentation tools — they are alignment mechanisms. A diagram compresses what would take pages of explanation into immediate shared understanding. A picture is not worth a thousand words — it is worth thousands of milliseconds of lost interpretation time.
Final Thesis
Modern innovation is not defined by ideas or tools alone. It is defined by the ability to:
- ›Learn faster than certainty
- ›Communicate faster than ambiguity
- ›Decide faster than complexity accumulates
- ›Build systems that become defensible over time
Closing Insight
The companies that win are not those with the best ideas. They are the ones that reduce interpretation lag, increase learning velocity, design defensible systems, and maintain alignment under complexity.
Innovation is not a department or a process. It is a system of accelerated understanding and compounding advantage.
Career
Experience
Vice President, Engineering & UM Product Management
Medecision
Integrated health management software company (wholly-owned subsidiary of HCSC BCBS IL, TX, OK, NM, MT) supporting virtual care and digital health.
- ›Reporting to CEO, leads delivery of Utilization Management, Appeals & Grievances, API Access, Care Intelligence Engine, Provider Portal, and AgentFoundry — a healthcare-native Agentic AI platform
- ›Launched new Utilization Management platform — a comprehensive solution for streamlining UM processes across payer and provider networks, including prior authorization workflows, clinical review, and turnaround time management
- ›Launched new Appeals & Grievances product — enabling payers to manage, track, and resolve member and provider appeals with configurable workflows and audit-ready documentation
- ›Led company-wide FHIR API strategy ensuring full compliance with the 21st Century Cures Act (ONC Final Rule) and CMS Interoperability & Patient Access Rule (CMS-9115)
- ›Implemented Da Vinci implementation guides: Prior Authorization Support (PAS), Coverage Requirements Discovery (CRD), Documentation Templates & Rules (DTR), and Payer Data Exchange (PDex) — enabling real-time payer-provider interoperability
- ›Leads cross-functional team of up to 100 including BAs, PMs, UI/UX designers, architects, and developers
- ›Directed migration of UM infrastructure from hybrid Rackspace/AWS to Google Cloud Platform
- ›Led architectural shift to scalable multi-tenant data platform
Chief Technology Officer & Chief Product Officer
Startup OS (Silicon Valley Bank)
Multi-sided platform designed to foster a community for founders, mentors, and investors.
- ›Recruited by Silicon Valley Bank to realign product development strategy
- ›Led product relaunch within 5 months after the company struggled with product-market fit
- ›Built and scaled high-performing team across engineering, design, and product management
- ›Implemented full product metrics framework: Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Monetization
Vice President, Enterprise Architecture
Medecision
- ›Designed and architected a scalable multi-cloud Data Platform (AWS → GCP)
- ›Spearheaded migration from Universal Data model to HL7 FHIR-based models
- ›Implemented Google Cloud Healthcare API including HL7® FHIR®, HL7® v2, and DICOM® APIs
- ›Architected new reporting solution using BigQuery, Amazon S3 data lake, and Redshift EDW
Sr. Technical Manager, Product Management
Zynx Health (Hearst Health)
Zynx integrates evidence-based information into healthcare workflows to optimize decision-making.
- ›Built and launched Lumynz at HIMSS 2019 — a cloud-based clinical performance improvement platform identifying practice variations and driving evidence-based provider behavior change
- ›Implemented FHIR ResearchStudy and ResearchSubject resources for evidence-based decision-making
- ›Led three Google Ventures Design Sprints with Zynx and Hearst Health teams
Director of Product Software Development
Lanvera
Provider of end-to-end outsourcing solutions for transactional documents across healthcare, banking, and utilities.
- ›Collaborated with CEO to transform company into a SaaS software business
- ›Transitioned development methodology from Waterfall to Agile Scrum
President / Co-founder, CTO
Blueberry Home / Groovice, Inc.
Founder
- ›Secured significant investment from NFX Guild and relocated to Silicon Valley
- ›Successfully launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco (Sept 2015)
- ›Built distributed team across Silicon Valley, Dallas, Chicago, and Austin
Leadership Team / Director of Product & Engineering
Vizient (VHA, Inc. | Novation | Aptitude, LLC)
- ›Won internal innovation challenge from 3,000 employees leading to creation of Aptitude, securing $10B in spend data
- ›Scaled Aptitude team from 4 to 70+ including engineers and clinicians
- ›Designed and launched MicroStrategy dashboards driving 60% increase in hospital utilization
- ›Boosted Novation finance performance 30% through new Cash Receivable System integrated with Lawson ERP
Senior Application Developer, Enterprise Solutions
Compuware Corp
Developed, architected, and enhanced applications for clients including Merck, ExxonMobil, State of Florida, and State of Michigan.
Intellectual Property
U.S. Patents
Healthcare Technology — 5 granted patents
Highlights
Selected Projects
Career-defining initiatives
Technical
Skills
Cloud
Frontend
Backend
Databases
API & Interoperability
Design & Tooling
Achievements
Recognition
Awards
Thought Leadership Excellence (Individual)
Novation / Aptitude Board of Directors — from CEO
2014
Thought Leadership Excellence (Team)
Novation / Aptitude Board of Directors — from CEO
2014
Thought Leadership Excellence (Individual)
Novation — from CEO
2012
Training & Certifications
Life Beyond Tech
Beyond the Work
Fifty years on the water — from a Sabot dinghy on a Canadian lake in 1976 to racing keelboats across the Pacific and Caribbean. Sailing is where strategy, leadership, and performance under pressure all converge.
Let's Talk
Contact
Whether you're exploring a leadership opportunity, discussing a healthcare technology challenge, or want to talk platform strategy — I'm happy to connect.