For the first time since its founding in 2021, serious mental illness startup Vanna Health has a new CEO. Dr. Liz Kwo will succeed the company’s co-founder and CEO Dr. Giovanni Colella, effective immediately.
Kwo joined Vanna Health in February as president. She has previously held leadership roles at Elevance, Everlywell and InfiniteMD. Kwo also serves on the boards of directors of Kestra Medical Technologies and Walmart and has been a lecturer at Harvard Medical School for more than 9 years.
Kwo said she hopes to take the company into new territories and deepen existing technology and data capabilities with automation.
“We’re expanding in quite a lot of regions right now, and we also want to improve our technology,” Kwo told Behavioral Health Business. “We want to automate a lot more of the tasks, so that our coaches are armed with all the important skill sets and career laddering of what they need, but also the technology to sort of take the difficult, more manual tasks off their plates.”
In addition to bolting on automation capabilities, Kwo said Vanna is also working to refine its predictive analytics to inform care in real-time.
The San Francisco-based company presently operates in Massachusetts and has partnerships in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Kwo’s goal is to expand Vanna’s services to multiple other states soon, though she did not specify where. The new Vanna Health CEO also detailed plans to take on the total cost of care like its competitor firsthand.
“I think value-based care is much more proactive, which we think is why companies like ours are actually being paid for and reimbursed for in the right way,” Kwo said. “When we take all the risk of the medical costs, we are incentivizing to do the right thing for the member.”
As Kwo takes the helm, Colella will stay on as the company’s executive chairman to oversee strategy and partnerships. Colella is a known entrepreneur in the healthcare sector and helped co-found Brightline, OODA Health and Castlight Health.
Colella and Dr. Tom Insel, another serial entrepreneur in the space, co-founded Vanna Health in 2021 with a business model that supports individuals who have SMIs with wraparound care and helps them schedule primary care appointments. One of the company’s priorities from the outset has been treating SMI while addressing physical health simultaneously. Patients with these diagnoses have an average life expectancy loss of 10 years and an overall lifetime cost burden that ranges between $1.85 million and $3 million, according to research from the University of Southern California.
Vanna Health raised $29 million to launch and scale its services in December 2022. As the company continues to scale and expand into new geographic territories, Kwo said a central focus will be on growing payer partnerships.
“Each region is so different, so being able to have knowledge and a know-how to do it within that space is key,” Kwo said. “Then our partnerships with our payers, I think that’s really important for us as we scale and build out our capabilities with each payer, because each payer is also asking for different things, because they’re all trying to do slightly different [things], because they’re also competitors with each other, so helping them manage how they’re looking at it too.”
