Editor’s note: This story is part of our 2022 PharmaVoice 100 feature.
Our honoree: Dr. Maureen Hennessey
Title: Senior vice president, director of value transformation at PRECISIONvalue
The company’s focus: PRECISIONvalue is part of the Precision Medicine Group, a company of clinical research and life science innovators addressing a range of challenges from product development to commercialization.
Hennessey’s biggest wins: Hennessey joined PRECISIONvalue almost a decade ago, bringing deep subject matter expertise in the area of managed care, having served in executive roles at several major health plans and systems where she was instrumental in developing clinical and population health management programs. She has established herself as a well-respected and sought after expert on a multitude of topics related to “nonadherence, social networking and engagement, proactive and preventive patient outreach and messaging, social disparities and inequities of care, and the impact of mental health and other psychosocial conditions on nonadherence.”
“Since joining PRECISIONvalue nine years ago, she has provided leadership for more than 500 quality and population health engagements with more than 35 clients in at least 17 therapeutic areas, supporting life science clients and their customers as they transition their models to value-based care. [Hennessey] has curated extensive experience as a C-level executive, clinician, academician, innovator, coach, and quality leader in managed/integrated care. On a national level, she has led teams to develop innovative products and strategies for industry executives and market access decision-makers,” one of her nominators says.
Additionally, with the support of PRECISIONvalue, Hennessey’s volunteer service on healthcare committees has included the NQF/CMS Medicaid Innovation Accelerator Project, and the Addressing Social Determinants of Health workshop series convened by the Pharmacy Quality Alliance and the Patient Advocate Foundation, sponsored by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, to help establish industry standards around SDOH, health equity and patient safety.
Her impact: Hennessey is fearless in her dedication and pursuit to address the gaps that exist in today’s healthcare system that lead to medication nonadherence and impact social determinants of health.
“In 2021, [Hennessey] led the PRECISIONvalue Care Management industry survey, where she identified nonadherence as one of the top three challenges identified by care managers — a challenge costing the U.S. pharmaceutical industry an estimated $250 billion a year in revenue or a loss of 50% to 60% of total annual drug sales,” a nominator notes. “Nonadherence is also estimated to cause 125,000 avoidable deaths and $100 billion annually in preventable healthcare costs. This highlights the importance of forging new types of multi-stakeholder collaborations and alliances, expanding value-based reimbursement models, and driving more population health initiatives among clinicians and care managers to increase adherence.”
Throughout her career, Hennessey has been adept at bringing together stakeholders spanning the healthcare ecosystem, resulting in significant collaborations and new models to affect change. During her time as a managed care executive in the 80s through 2000s, Hennessey invented telehealth and SDOH models of care, recognizing they could be used as interventions to improve nonadherence and improve health outcomes. These models garnered recognition from NCQA and eValue8TM (National Business Coalition on Health).
“Her telehealth initiatives helped build patient and family trust and led to further innovations: the development of networks for transporting patients to ambulatory care and care-in-the-home services to help patients navigate barriers to accessing healthcare and adhering to medication. Later, patient safety became another focus of innovation for [Hennessey] and her teams as hospitals shifted their emphasis to psychiatric crisis stabilization, patient safety, and streamlined transitions to community services,” her nominator says.
“I strive to synthesize diverse ideas to create and persuade others of the need for innovative solutions.”
Maureen Hennessey
Senior vice president, director of value transformation, PRECISIONvalue
Through these initiatives, Hennessey and her teams improved adherence and helped prevent “relapses by patients with suicidal ideation.” One such program, which led to Hennessey serving as a gubernatorial appointee to a suicide prevention advisory committee, “provided in-home support for patients with suicide attempt histories, supplemented by round-the-clock telephonic support and medication safety plans for patients, their support systems, and their ambulatory care teams, to successfully reduce medication overdoses,” a nominator says.
Why she’s inspiring: Hennessey’s passion to address health inequities stems from a personal experience in which her mother was unable to receive the care she needed. As a young adult, Hennessey was inspired to buck the status quo and find a unique solution to a problem that ultimately improved the quality of life for her ailing mother who was home-bound and in need of treatment.
“Understanding how population health interventions like home care could dramatically improve the quality of a patient’s life, [Hennessey] began to focus on how the lack of access to care could deeply and adversely impact the quality of care and life for patients,” a nominator says. “It shaped her career and continues to make an impact on our company, our clients, and — most importantly — patients and families. With a vision for bringing the worlds of pharma and payers closer together, [Hennessey] continues to emphasize value-based partnerships and alliances as she focuses on reducing care gaps and preventable hospitalizations and promoting sustainable, inclusive care for everyone.”
Hennessey continues to inspire her colleagues and peers by pushing “the boundaries on what patient-centric care could and should be for all populations.”
“[Hennessey] has raised the bar in the areas of quality, population health and SDOH. She has the rare combination of passion, compassion, credibility, interpersonal skills and leadership that is greatly needed to drive change that must occur to fix our highly flawed — and fragmented — healthcare system,” a nominator says.
In her own words: “The values of the healthcare ecosystem are evolving towards the ‘quintuple aim’ — improved patient experience and care team well-being; better outcomes and affordable care; and health equity,” Hennessey says. “Pharma operates in a landscape in which accurate, scientific truth is competing against misleading misinformation and disinformation campaigns. Just as misinformation and disinformation messaging styles and strategies have evolved, so must the messaging strategies and styles of pharma evolve to restore public trust in medical science.”
