John O’Connor
Managing Director
Health Management Associates
Los Angeles, CA
[javascript protected email address]
(323) 807-0215
John O’Connor is a seasoned executive with extensive program planning, evaluation, management, strategy, and complex funding experience in dynamic healthcare, corporate, foundation, and nonprofit organizations. With 30 years in cause-related work and a strong record of accomplishment, he brings effective leadership to projects and deep expertise in building rural health networks, substance use disorder (SUD) treatment and prevention, LGBTQ community wellness, and public health programs.
John has provided strategic leadership for HMA Community Strategies, serving clients nationwide. Working as a managing director for eight years, John sets and executes vision, strategy, and growth plans to grow HMA’s impact in advancing client goals. In this role, he has expanded multidisciplinary teams of consultants and ensured high performance, professional development, thought leadership, and collaboration for all client engagements and for the good of the field. Under his leadership tenure, the service line’s portfolio of projects has grown to exceed $14 million, spanning across an expansive range of subject matter and functional expertise to maximize service to HMA clients.
In his own consulting work at HMA, John is focused on supporting medical and behavioral health systems, public health systems, community-based services and supports, and partners across all sectors to solve problems related to health and wellness, particularly through establishing and strengthening linkages between community-based social services and healthcare. His depth and breadth of experience in leadership and program operations enables him to support clients in making their programs more successful and bringing them to scale. As a former nonprofit executive, John brings the persistence, tenacity, and precision required to problem solve in the face of enormous challenges, limited resources, and intense time pressures.
John leverages his experience to support HMA clients in accomplishing their organizational goals and addressing complex challenges. In his previous professional roles, he developed deep expertise in organizational transformation through restructuring work to set struggling organizations on a course of strengthening leadership, staffing, program operations, funding, and operations. John served in the project manager and program director roles for three State Opioid Response-funded contracts from the California Department of Health Care Services. This work spanned six years and included budgets in excess of $15 million.
Other key accomplishments in his HMA consulting portfolio include leading the local evaluation teams for four of the seven statewide California Reducing Disparities Project LGBTQ programs funded and overseen by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). Additionally, John served as the project manager for the CDPH Future of Public Health Community Health Financing and Investment Strategic Plan project, which leveraged a complex array of public health stakeholders to directly inform the resulting finance model, tool, and training program. The deliverables for this project were used to help local health jurisdictions model and project their agency financing and plan for future navigation of a tremendously complex funding landscape.
Prior to joining HMA in 2015, John capped a career in community-based work as the executive director of Equality California where he brought stability to the struggling organization and repositioned it to, among other things, focus more effectively on LGBT health and wellness. Through strong program planning and development, foundation outreach, government funding expertise, and public policy advocacy, the health work grew to include research, public education, enrollment, forums and panels, and coalitions to advance shared agendas statewide.
John earned his bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University.