The merged company of Castlight Health and Vera Whole Health named former Cerner president Donald Trigg as its CEO.
The two companies rebranded the joint venture as apree health. apree will be similar to a holding company with Vera and Castlight as products underneath.
“Don is a proven industry leader who has spent almost two decades at the intersection of healthcare and IT to help improve health outcomes. He is the right chief executive to drive our efforts to unlock and scale value-based care for the benefit of providers, patients, plan sponsors, and health plans,” Ronald Williams, chairman of apree, said in a press release.
Castlight, a healthcare navigation tech company, and Vera Whole Health, a tech-enabled primary care provider, came together in a $370 million deal. Vera Whole Health's majority shareholder, private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, invested $338 million toward the merger with support from Morgan Health and Anthem Health Solutions.
As part of the deal, Castlight went from a publicly traded to a private company. As the public market has cooled, other formerly publicly traded digital health companies such as Tivity Health and SOC Telemed have followed suit.
Trigg was at Cerner for eight years, leaving when the company brought on Dr. David Feinberg as CEO. During his time at Cerner, the company’s revenue increased from $800 million to almost $6 billion. He oversaw the strategic direction of Cerner’s core electronic health record and revenue cycle products.
It also coincided with a time when Cerner was shifting its focus from EHRs to data and data systems with a goal of creating a $1 billion "data-as-a-service" business. In December 2021, the Austin, Texas-based Oracle bought Cerner for $28.3 billion.
