Geneia promotes chief strategy officer to president

Listen to this article

Heather Lavoie, the company’s chief strategy officer, has been named president, a new executive position at Geneia. She will run the day-to-day management of the company, allowing CEO Mark Caron to focus on long-term growth strategy and business development.

Geneia is a subsidiary of Capital BlueCross, an insurer based in Susquehanna Township, Dauphin County. It has more than 250 employees and contractors, including nearly 200 employees at its Harrisburg headquarters on Cameron Street.

“It really is a result of the growth and maturation of the company,” Lavoie said of her promotion.

The analytics firm sells its technology to health insurance plans across the country, as well as to hospital and medical groups. It integrates data from clinical information, claims data, pharmacy and laboratory data, as well as other information that might help companies better understand patient care and develop stronger modeling capabilities.

Last year, Geneia teamed up with Salesforce to broaden distribution of the company’s signature product for population health management. Under a partnership between the two companies, customers using the Salesforce Health Cloud product are able to access Geneia’s Theon platform, which uses data analytics to improve population health.

Health insurers and providers use Health Cloud much like other organizations use Salesforce, as a form of customer relationship management, only tailored for patients. Health Cloud also hosts applications and products from other companies that augment its basic service. Geneia’s Theon is one of those applications, available through an additional licensing fee and offering the potential to strengthen coordination of patient care.

As a result of that Salesforce relationship and other sales efforts, Geneia has been able to add 42 employees over the last year, Lavoie said. The new hires include software developers and data scientists.

Lavoie said the company hopes to hire another 15 people between its offices in Harrisburg, New Hampshire and Tennessee.

However, a tight labor market in a growing economy has made it harder to find skilled tech talent, she added. There also are greater constraints on a visa program known as H-1B that allows companies to hire foreign workers, which has impacted tech hiring in the U.S.

But with schools like Harrisburg University of Science and Technology continuing to grow enrollment and expand into new educational programs in health sciences, Lavoie is optimistic that Geneia will be able to find the workers it needs.