Apree Health has a new face. Longtime healthcare executive Jon Porter took over the company Jan. 1 as CEO.
Apree helps employers and health plans engage members through technology, navigation and advanced primary care with comprehensive clinical support.
Porter takes the reins of the advanced primary care and technology company from Don Trigg, who was appointed CEO when Castlight Health and Vera Whole Health merged to form Apree in 2022.
Porter has a long career in healthcare. He started as a consultant at Deloitte, then moved into the healthcare startup world where he worked at a company managing risk contracts. After the acquisition of one startup, he worked as chief product officer at athenahealth for eight years. Porter explained he felt drawn to working at the intersection of providers and payers, and he next went to Bright Health where he stayed through its “meteoric rise” and initial public offering.
Porter was tapped to become the next CEO of apree health last summer, with a start date of Jan. 1, 2025. He joined the company in August to learn the business from Trigg and transition into the company’s leading role.
Since August, Porter has identified a few strategic directions in which he wants to take the company. One is the deconstruction of apree’s advanced primary care offering into separate service lines, and the other is to reinvigorate Castlight.
On the advanced primary care side, Porter wants to make it easier for customers to adopt specific parts of the solution, like virtual urgent care or behavioral healthcare. Porter explained that people under 45 are less likely to engage in all aspects of advanced primary care. For those customers, he wants to make portions of the business more accessible.
“The thesis to buying an advanced primary care model was a lot of advanced primary care has trouble getting engagement,” Porter said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare. “I think the failing is we actually, as a business, pivoted too heavily to primary care, and kind of alienated our Castlight clients, and didn't actually invest in the strategic thesis.”
Apree plans to relaunch Castlight in the next 30 days and invest in more capabilities throughout the year. Porter wants to reinvigorate Castlight’s rewards and incentives with more focus on gamification. The company has a prototype of a conversational user interface (UI) that will allow beneficiaries and employers to more easily find their health plan benefits through voice activation and messaging.
Porter also wants to expand the company’s partnering strategy on the provider and tech sides of the business, including bringing on partners that are potential competitors. “In the end, to deliver an ROI for our shared clients, we need to work together,” Porter explained.
He continued: “We are leaning into the idea that we are an aggregator, right? And you can see it where, on the primary care side, we are equally as happy to make other primary care providers perform like us as we are to own the providers,” Porter said. “We believe in order to actually fundamentally change healthcare, we can't need to own all of it.”