Aledade’s New Chief Product Officer Rosemary Weldon and Her Vision to Keep Evolving Our Platform

I have always been fascinated by how consumers and patients make decisions. I spent the first decade of my career consulting with companies and nonprofits across consumer goods, retail, pharma and health care – using both quantitative and qualitative data to unlock insights about how choices are made to help improve business performance. When I shifted into product management at CVS Health, I was able to take my business experience and leverage it to map out the best way we could invest technology capacity to support consumers and patients across retail, pharmacy, telehealth and the national clinical network. Leading the technology aspects of standing up nationwide COVID testing was an experience I will never forget, and it made me even more committed to dedicating my career to making an impact in health care. I think we all know from personal experience that there is so much opportunity to better coordinate across providers, to make it easier for patients to be more in control and to support models that incentivize preventative care. Value-based care was a natural next step for me, and I was compelled by Aledade’s mission and business model – we succeed only when our independent primary care practices succeed. There is significant value to the whole health care system in actually delivering more primary care to patients by avoiding hospitalizations, preventing and slowing chronic disease and helping patients navigate their care.

I was thrilled to join Aledade in the summer of 2022 to help stand up and scale the new part of the Aledade platform in which we are directly contacting, engaging, and supporting patients on behalf of our primary care practices. With this approach, we are able to offer highly specialized services to patients including comprehensive advanced care planning, kidney care management and medication adherence support.

As I’ve moved into the CPO role, I have been reflecting on how the Product and Tech teams have scaled to support an increasingly sophisticated model, including leveraging more data sets and advanced analytics in the Aledade App, offering patient outreach services to our practices and building new capabilities to help our ACOs perform across many contract types. One example of how we support improving patient outcomes is by collaborating with our practices to encourage medication adherence among their patients. Patients who have a gap in care receive outreach from our practices and, where practices want extra help, our centralized pharmacy tech team reaches out via phone or text. Patient status and any clinical barriers are visible to practices in the Aledade App, ensuring we stay coordinated and help patients get back on therapy. To enable experience like this, we continue to invest in using the best and most recent clinical data, building and training models to predict needed interventions at the patient level, connecting systems and workflows to share work between practices and our central teams and also measuring performance to keep improving.

As we build out increasingly sophisticated capabilities, we need to coordinate across multiple development, clinical and field teams, surface and make ongoing prioritization and sequencing decisions and ultimately optimize for great user experiences. I am leveraging my experience with scaled agile environments to provide the scaffolding we need to build out this next stage of Aledade’s technology. We are shaping our roadmap to further optimize practice workflows, to integrate predictive models into the opportunities we prioritize in our App, to support increasing collaboration between our practices and centralized clinical services and to build out direct-to-patient experiences to augment the work our practices do on the ground. I am excited about the opportunity to lead our amazing team – and about the impact we will make for our practices and patients.