On Tuesday, April 9, 2024, we lost Jason O’Grady, at age 50 after a courageous battle with cancer. His positive attitude, generous spirit and bright smile will be missed by so, so many. Most of all by “his girls,” loving wife Maggie and adoring daughter Molly.

His wonderful spirit was celebrated on Sunday, April 28, 2024, at the Chicago Botanic Garden, which was attended by several members of the CME community.

A Tribute by Mike Adler

I've been given the honor to write about my good friend Jason O'Grady.

After joining myCME/Haymarket Medical Education in 2012, it didn't take long for Jason and me to become lifelong friends.

As a person, Jason was personable, positive, thoughtful, loyal and possessed a great sense of humor. As a businessman, he was professional, honest, talented and admired by his clients and colleagues. We made a great team.

He was open about his battle with cancer and would always appreciate encouragement and support.

We shared a common bond for the love of our families and friends.  

I know that many of us who knew him have similar stories.

Jason will be greatly missed by all. He was, after all, a true mensch.

A Tribute by Mike LoPresti

In honor of Jason O’Grady, and all he represented.

When someone is no longer in our lives, we all grieve the lost relationship in our own ways and to varying degrees based on the cause — breakup, drifting apart, divorce, death or one of a multitude of other reasons. For me, I inevitably ask myself, “How well did I really know this person?” Why do I wonder about this? I’m not entirely sure. Maybe to consider if I’d valued the relationship enough. Maybe to reflect on the loss and its cause(s).

Our industry’s heartbreaking reactions to the loss of Jason O’Grady has my reflection engine in overdrive.

I first met Jason when I was selling ad space in SLACK Incorporated medical journals and newspapers, and he was a media planner at Abelson Taylor. Print was king, the internet wasn’t ready for prime time, video conferencing was something only the Jetsons did, and FedEx (newly shortened from Federal Express) was the fastest way to get a document into your client’s hands. Jason and I were babies, doing our respective jobs while still learning what those jobs actually entailed. It will surprise virtually no one reading this article that he welcomed me to AT’s office on Wacker Drive with a friendly smile and a hearty handshake. He was a refreshingly positive person. “Jason must be young and not yet disillusioned by our industry,” I thought. Or he’s just another Midwesterner who seems incredibly friendly compared to my typical cynical Northeast world spanning Baltimore to Boston.

After a few years of friendly work partnering, we lost track of each other. A decade later, we crossed paths a bit during his time at myCME. We had a few conversations where we both hung up the phone or responded to an email going, “O’Grady … sounds familiar,” or “LoPresti? Didn’t I know a LoPresti once?” It wasn’t until he joined Postgraduate Institute for Medicine that we truly reconnected and our brains clicked simultaneously. We were transported back to Wacker Drive, shared stories of where we’d been since that time, and caught up on families and where we were now. Same friendly face, same positive person. He was still based in Chicago, so it had to be a Midwestern personality thing. I caught up with him again, a little deeper this time, when he joined Healio.

Through my wife, Becky Carney, who I met in our industry, I learned about Jason’s horrific cancer diagnosis. She told me with tears in her eyes how he had been misdiagnosed and his suspicions of cancer had been dismissed. The cancer had spread through the body of someone who truly didn’t deserve it. He was fighting it, hard, and if anyone could beat it, it would be Jason, she told me.

We know now that while he did win a bunch of smaller battles, he ultimately lost the war, still fighting for his life until the very end.

I was extremely fortunate to join Vindico, Healio’s sister company, and work with Jason under the same roof. Becky and I had lunch with him last October when we were both in Chicago for a conference, and there was the same effervescent smile and positivity that I first experienced some 20-plus years earlier. That’s when it truly hit me that what I was experiencing was simply Jason. Over lunch, I learned about his screen printing and his love of art, music and food. I got to know him better in a couple of hours than I had in a few decades.

My self-reflection on Jason? I’m sorry that I lost touch with him back in the 1990s and didn’t get to really know him until it was too late. I now knew that my life had been emptier because I’d lost communication with a damn good human being. This realization was reinforced by all of the feedback I’ve read in texts and in posts, and in conversations within our company and with friends and contacts across our industry.

“Jason was one of the kindest humans I have ever met. He never had a bad word to say about anyone and always had a knack for seeing the good in everything. He will be dearly missed.”

“We were all lucky to walk some of this life alongside Jason.”

Read more tributes to Jason.

I’m not being melodramatic when I say that I had goosebumps as I repeated these outpourings of love for Jason.

To those of you who knew him so much better than me — for example, those who carried a cardboard of his face around our Alliance 2023 Annual Conference so we could send him pictures “with him” and let him know just how much he was missed — I hope I did his legacy appropriate justice. From someone who wishes he had known Jason better, please always remember how lucky you were to have had such an amazing person lighting up your life over the years.

To have known Jason was truly a gift. May the gift of Jason keep on giving among those of us who knew him, and, even more important, may we all pay forward his gifts of optimism, kindness, friendliness, connections and laughter.

A 529 savings plan has been established by some of Jason’s friends for his daughter, Molly. If you are interested, please text your name, phone number and email address to Marisa Maxwell at 312-504-9839, and you will receive an email from Brightstart.