Name: Carrie Nelson
Old title: Senior vice president and CMO for Population Health and Health Outcomes, Advocate Aurora Health
New title: Chief medical officer, Amwell
Amwell has tapped Nelson as its new CMO, filling a role that’s been vacant since last summer, the telehealth provider announced Wednesday.
The company’s previous CMO, Peter Antall, departed Amwell in August to become CMO of virtual behavioral healthcare startup Brightline.
Since then, a group of medical directors has led Amwell’s clinical team, the company told Healthcare Dive.
As CMO, Nelson will focus on helping Amwell’s payer and provider clients get the most out of the vendor’s infrastructure platform Converge, launched last spring, and help them leverage hybrid care programs to improve population health.
Nelson will also have clinical oversight of the physicians in Amwell’s clinical branch, Amwell Medical Group.
“Carrie’s clinical perspective will be crucial to the continued sales and implementation of our infrastructure software,” Amwell COO Kurt Knight said in a statement on Nelson’s appointment.
Amwell has been laser focused on expanding Converge’s capabilities and migrating existing customers over to the new platform. However, rising R&D costs and customer churn as a result have weighed on the Boston-based virtual care vendor’s finances.
Nelson joins Amwell from Illinois-based regional health system Advocate Aurora, where — along with being an SVP and CMO — the executive also served as the chief clinical officer for Advocate Physician Partners, an internal group focused on value-based care in partnership with employed and independent physician practices. She also worked as a family medicine physician for almost three decades.
Amwell isn’t the only telehealth provider to have recent turnover in top clinical roles. In April, Teladoc also announced a new CMO, who came to the virtual care giant from Amazon Web Services.
