********Please note that the consultants / Contractors need to be on our W2 *******
Title: Release Manager
Duration: 6 Months
Client: Mayo Clinic
Req ID: 37203023
Remote
Release Manager — Virtual Care Platforms
Role Summary
The Release Manager is responsible for establishing, governing, and continuously improving the release management discipline for the organization’s digital health ecosystem, with a primary focus on vendor-supported inpatient video visit platforms. This role ensures reliable, secure, and compliant delivery of software changes that enable high-quality virtual care for patients while minimizing operational risk across clinical, technical, and regulatory domains.
The position sits at the intersection of DevOps, ITIL service management, vendor coordination, and healthcare compliance, orchestrating releases across integrated systems including EHR platforms, and telehealth solutions.
Key Responsibilities
Release Governance & Process Maturity
- Design, implement, and enforce a standardized release management framework aligned with ITIL, DevOps, and healthcare regulatory requirements.
- Establish release calendars, change windows, and deployment standards to reduce disruption to clinical operations.
- Lead release readiness reviews, go/no-go decisions, and post-implementation retrospectives.
- Develop and maintain release policies, runbooks, and audit-ready documentation.
Vendor & Telehealth Platform Coordination
- Serve as the primary technical liaison for vendor-supported video visit platforms (e.g., telehealth SaaS providers).
- Coordinate vendor release schedules, patches, and upgrades with internal change control processes.
- Validate vendor changes for compatibility with integrated systems such as EHR, patient identity management, and scheduling workflows.
- Ensure vendor SLAs and release communications meet operational and clinical needs.
Environment & Deployment Management
- Oversee deployment pipelines across development, test, staging, and production environments.
- Ensure environment parity and configuration management for integrated healthcare applications.
- Partner with DevOps teams to automate deployments, rollback procedures, and release verification.
Risk, Compliance & Patient Safety
- Ensure all releases comply with HIPAA, HITECH, and organizational security policies.
- Conduct risk assessments for releases impacting patient data, clinical workflows, or telehealth availability.
- Implement controls to safeguard PHI during deployments and vendor updates.
- Support audit and compliance reporting for regulatory reviews.
Cross-Functional Coordination
- Collaborate with clinical operations, digital product teams, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and service desk teams to ensure release readiness.
- Communicate release impacts to stakeholders including clinicians, call centers, and patient support teams.
- Coordinate downtime procedures and contingency planning to protect patient access to care.
Observability & Continuous Improvement
- Define and track release KPIs such as deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR, and patient-impact incidents.
- Lead root cause analyses for release-related incidents affecting virtual care.
- Drive process improvements that increase release velocity without compromising reliability or compliance.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Healthcare Informatics, or related field.
- 5+ years of experience in release management, DevOps, or IT service management in a regulated environment.
- Demonstrated experience coordinating releases for vendor-supported SaaS platforms.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and environment promotion strategies.
- Experience working within HIPAA-compliant environments and handling PHI securely.
- Familiarity with ITIL change and release management processes.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting telehealth or digital health platforms.
- Knowledge of EHR integrations (e.g., HL7, FHIR APIs).
- ITIL Foundation or higher certification.
- Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or AWS) in healthcare contexts.
- Background in incident management and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices.
Core Competencies
- Systems Thinking: Understands dependencies across clinical and technical ecosystems.
- Risk Management: Balances speed of delivery with patient safety and compliance.
- Stakeholder Communication: Translates technical release details into clinical and operational impact.
- Process Engineering: Builds scalable, repeatable release workflows.
- Vendor Management: Ensures accountability and alignment with healthcare delivery needs.
Success Metrics
- Reduction in release-related incidents impacting patient care.
- Improved deployment success rate and reduced rollback frequency.
- Increased predictability of vendor updates and integration compatibility.
- Enhanced clinician and patient satisfaction with virtual care reliability.
Impact
This role directly supports the organization’s mission to deliver accessible, high-quality inpatient virtual care. By strengthening release discipline around video visit platforms and their integrations, the Release Manager ensures patients and clinicians can rely on secure, stable, and seamless telehealth experiences.
Required Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Healthcare Informatics or related field. (or equivalent experience).
Preferred Certifications & Licensure:ITIL Foundation certification or higher certification.