Jake Orville is a 2018 Cleveland Smart 50 honoree and Innovation award winner
True innovators go to great lengths to change the world around them, says Jake Orville, general manager at Cleveland HeartLab, a CardioMetabolic and Endo franchise at Quest Diagnostics.
“You can be known as innovative, but to be disruptive in your innovation, you have to do more than move the needle,” Orville says. “To get recognized as a leader and to gain momentum in your innovation, you have to have exponential growth and make a big impact.”
Orville and his team took aim at heart disease, the nation’s leading killer of both men and women. In his view, nothing else comes close to it both in terms of clinical need and the opportunity to make a profound impact — the inflammation testing that CHL has developed could eliminate billions in health care costs.
A comprehensive effort
Cleveland HeartLab was bought by New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics late last year to serve as the base for Quest’s first national cardiometabolic center of excellence. The mission is to help patients and physicians nationwide identify the hidden risks of heart disease.
“For us, we were certainly able to demonstrate the impact we were having in the ability to get physicians and clinicians to utilize our testing as we grew the company exponentially over time,” Orville says. “We wanted to make sure it was the right synergy, the right marriage, the right opportunity to ensure the high value that we created was truly going to be realized.”
The key to CHL’s success, however, is Orville’s commitment to innovation at every step.
“It’s innovation in how you market your product, how you sell it, how you report the results and how you bring education in behind it,” Orville says. “Giving clinicians and patients the information won’t cause them to change their behavior. But educating them and informing them, giving them opportunities to learn and understand what they could do differently, was really something that made a difference. It was the bundle of all of that that really made Cleveland HeartLab stand out.”
Changing lives
Orville has built a team that deeply believes in what it is doing and its ability to change lives.
“I can get up and say, ‘Hey, we’re making a dent in cardiovascular disease,’ and that can feel good,” Orville says. “It’s really boiling it down to the idea that an individual person’s life, someone we are impacting positively every day, is an awesome responsibility for all of us.” ●
Related story: Cleveland HeartLab partners up to scale its mission to save lives
