Creating a culture of innovation

Our culture of curiosity is what drives us. We have been supporting innovation for global health care systems from Ireland for more than 20 years. Creative Director Patrick Mooney shares what it’s like to work in digital design at Optum as a hub of innovation

My name is Patrick Mooney, and I’m Creative Director here in Optum. I’m based out of the Dublin office. And I have the pleasure of working with Optum Digital Design.

So something that I am deeply proud of is the team that I have around me here.I think it’s because of the culture here at Optum. It’s a culture that’s based on curiosity. We are by default, curious designers. We want to understand how the world works. We want to understand how people use our products. And Optum has allowed us to actually do that on a day to day basis.

And I really put the hat on who’s going to use this, who is going to benefit from this. Because ultimately, one day, it could be us that’s benefiting from that.

And we’re here to support each other, no matter what happens, good, bad or indifferent. We’ve got teammates we can rely on. And we bake that in from day one.

I love that compassion is one of our values. We bring people into our labs, we watch people using our software, and we get into their shoes for those few moments to understand how we can make their lives better. We get to live that mission every single day.

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Innovation at work

We invest in our Irish team by focusing on recruiting top tech talent and developing programmes that encourage a problem-solving mindset. Hear from other employees to see how we’re bringing every aspect of health care together:

Software engineering

Learn about Priya Mishra’s role in the Letterkenny office and what it’s like to work with others who are passionate about modern tech stack system design and implementation.

Hi, I’m Priya Misha. I’m working as Manager Software Engineering and I’m working out of Optum’s Letterkenny office in Ireland.

We want people to have a better experience, through UnitedHealthcare. We want them to be able to navigate through their health care needs as seamlessly as possible. And in order to achieve that, you know, we have to grasp the evolving technological landscape and, plus, the ever changing, you know, health care sector.

My team and I are currently working on this intelligent micro service based platform. We are a group of engineers and architects who are passionate about modern tech stack system design and implementation.

So we don’t work in silos. So we have, you know, different teams, different partners, different stakeholders, who are supporting us through this journey.

We are coming together, trying to solve a singular problem, trying to make sure people are getting access to the best possible health care.

It's quite fulfilling and challenging.

I can see the systems or the platforms that we are creating, that’s actually having a positive impact in people’s life.

Data science

Lisa Walsh is in the Dublin office and collaborates with people in astrophysics, geospatial analytics and finance. See how she works towards innovation to brainstorm new ideas.

Hi there, my name is Lisa Walsh, and I’m a Data Scientist on the Stars Team, working at the Dublin office.

I don’t think you have many more opportunities for more rewarding work in the sense of how it’s actually applied.

And you’re going to be working with some of the smartest people in the industry, which is yeah, just really, really cool.

There’s really been a huge focus towards innovation, every quarter or so, there’s been a full, you know, half-hour— half-day session, just on people brainstorming ideas, for ways that we can make the health care experience better for people.

There’s people from all different backgrounds. For a while we had a streamer of all the flags from around the world put up right through the middle of the office, and there was pretty much a person per country represented. So there’s people who are coming in from astrophysics, there’s people who were coming from geospatial analysis, there’s people who were coming from finance, from all over.

I think I’d like people to know the standard of the work that’s being done here. The cutting edge technology that’s really been put into practice. You know, like the people that I’m working with, they’re, they’re working on patents that are going to, you know, change the health care industry on the technology side. And, you know, actually, we have one of the highest outputs of health care patents across any business, a big portion of it is coming from the Dublin office.

Collaborative innovation events

Throughout the year, our teams engage in fun, collaborative events such as:

Annual Research and Development Symposium
Invention mining sessions
Technical guild sessions
Process transformation session

We're scaling innovation to push health care forward.

Find out more