Program Director, OpenPHC India Initiative Full Time NEW

The Problem 

India has invested significantly in primary healthcare with over a million frontline workers, thousands of primary health centres, and decades of national programmes. Yet health outcomes remain poor. 60–70% of high-risk patients identified at the community level never complete their follow-up care. 

A single frontline health worker is responsible for 37 distinct health activities, from maternal care to tuberculosis to chronic disease screening with no decision support and management tools. A doctor at a primary health centre sees 60 patients a day with no continuity of records. A district officer managing outcomes across hundreds of facilities is working from data that is weeks old. There’s an opportunity here to enable existing people and infrastructure to work far more effectively. 

What We’ve Built and What We’re Building Next 

Medtronic Labs is a non-profit health systems innovator with over 10 years of experience transforming primary healthcare across eight countries.  

Our team (earlier at Dell) built and operated the National NCD Portal with the Health Ministry for the Ayushman Bharat Non-communicable diseases (hypertension, diabetes, cancers) management program. This digital infrastructure is deployed across 31 states, with 530+ million individuals enrolled and demonstrated that technology can be made to work at the scale of Indian public health systems. 

Medtronic Lab’s OpenPHC is our next chapter. It is designed to go beyond NCD screening into sustained care delivery, closing the loop between patient identification and follow-up care. 

OpenPHC works across three interconnected capabilities: 

• A Care Coordination Engine (CCE): digital public infrastructure designed to sit on top of India’s existing health DPI for closing the referral-to-follow-up loop 
• AI-powered tools for frontline workers: decision support and task management that reduce cognitive load and prevent patient loss at the point of care 
• The SPICE platform: for integrated primary healthcare delivery, proven across multiple countries. 

The Role 

This is a rare opportunity to transform how healthcare reaches hundreds of millions of people, especially those in rural and underserved communities who are most often left behind. We are looking for someone who brings both technical sharpness and genuine passion for solving this problem at population scale. 

You will be the primary driver of OpenPHC in India, effectively the CEO of this initiative, owning government relationships, fundraising, technology implementation, field adoption, and product direction. This is as much an execution role as a leadership one and you have the direct responsibility for the quality of what gets built and delivered on the ground. 

This means forging partnerships with central government bodies (MoHFW, NHSRC, AIIMS, ICMR etc), state health departments with their own priorities, and donors with different reporting requirements. Projects change leadership mid-way, have procurement constraints that impact timelines, and require you to re-establish relationships as the system evolves. When fifty thousand ASHA workers are using your system across a state, you need the judgment to know what is breaking on the ground and the discipline to fix it. You need patience as much as tenacity. 

You will work closely with the Chairperson, who brings deep government networks and strategic experience to the initiative. This is a role with clear delivery targets like states onboarded, partnerships signed, and people reached. You will be measured on outcomes, not activity. 

Key Responsibilities 

Government Partnerships 

• Own MoU negotiations and implementation follow-through with state health departments and national bodies. 
• Translate government requirements into product and delivery commitments, and deliver on them 

Fundraising 

• Own the pipeline and close deals with foundations, multilaterals, and government schemes 
• Build the narrative and evidence base that makes OpenPHC fundable at scale 

Implementation and Delivery 

• Ensure signed partnerships translate into ground-level outcomes: workers trained, systems live, patients tracked through to follow-up care 
• Manage vendor and system integrator relationships in coordination with the OpenPHC tech team 

Product and AI Roadmap 

• Collaborate with the tech team to shape the product and AI roadmap based on India’s field realities 
• Be the person who knows when the system is failing on the ground before the dashboards show it 

Who We’re Looking For 

The non-negotiable is technology. We are looking for people who have led technology-enabled programmes or organisations where technology was central to how impact was delivered. You don’t need to be an engineer, but you must have lived the gap between a working demo and a system used by fifty thousand people in the field. 

Beyond that, we are open to exceptional people from technology, government, public health, or the private sector with a proven record of executing at large scale. The sharpest candidates can zoom out to see system-level challenges and zoom in to granular ground reality. If you worked on Aadhaar, UPI, or a similar large-scale system, or built a product used by millions, you know the quality of judgment this demands. 

Government exposure is preferred but not a dealbreaker for a truly exceptional candidate: someone with an outstanding track record, the range to move into this domain fast, and a deeply-held, unambiguous commitment to social impact. 

Personal Qualities 

• High energy and relentless: you move fast, follow through without being asked, and close things 
• Strategic and comfortable with complexity: you hold multiple high-stakes workstreams simultaneously and know how to prioritise 
• Genuinely curious and open to learning: you invest your own time to go deep on domains you don’t yet know, and you are not satisfied with surface-level understanding 
• Comfortable with ambiguity: you define the path rather than follow one, and you can do this in a lean, resource-constrained environment 
• Fluent in AI as a leader: you actively use AI in your own work, understand what it can and cannot do in complex real-world deployments, and bring informed judgment to decisions about where AI creates genuine impact.