Maeve O’Meara, CEO, Castlight Health

Maeve O’Meara became CEO of Castlight Health, a healthcare navigation company, in July 2019. Since then, she has led the company through a transformation and a global pandemic. In this unique profile, Pulse writer Poorwa Godbole sat down with Maeve to learn about her decade-long experience working at Castlight, the company’s evolution before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and her advice to aspiring healthcare and women leaders.

Maeve O’Meara’s passion for healthcare developed at an early age. “Growing up in a relatively small town, my understanding of jobs in healthcare more broadly was non-existent. I thought my only option was to become a doctor, which is what I initially wanted to do,” she says. She graduated from the University of Virginia and initially planned to join the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Before matriculating to medical school, however, she took a management consulting job with Bain & Company, where she worked in the healthcare technology group. It was there and in her subsequent role in venture capital where she says she learned about the intersection of healthcare and technology and the broad impact it could have on people.

After graduating from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Maeve joined Castlight Health as a product manager, a job she was initially rejected from. “I applied a second time,” she says, “because I was really excited about what the company could be.” Castlight Health (NYSE: CSLT) began as a price transparency platform 10 years ago. Since then the company has evolved into a leader in healthcare navigation, delivering a highly personalized employee health and wellbeing benefits experience for Fortune 500 customers. As Maeve puts it, Castlight is shifting paradigms in healthcare in two ways. For employers, Castlight provides the infrastructure to help them make decisions around plan design and specific areas of healthcare spend in order to “best serve their employees and take on challenges specific to their populations.” For employees and their families, Maeve says: “It’s about helping them easily connect and engage with the right programs and care, at the right time. This drives improved outcomes, a better member experience, and lower costs. It’s about enabling, empowering, and guiding people to better care.”

“It’s about enabling, empowering, and guiding people to better care.”

Prior to becoming CEO in 2019, Maeve held several roles at Castlight over the last decade, including product management, analytics, and customer experience. She attributes her deep understanding of the company and ability to wear different hats to her roots in product management. “Coming out of Stanford where there is a focus on technology, it was clear to me that strategy and product had to live together,” she says. “Product management touches every single function and, in my opinion, gives you a birds-eye view of the company in a very unique way.”

Maeve admits “it’s pretty unusual” these days to stay at a company as long as she has, but many others on her team have been at the company for 10 years as well. Knowing the ins and outs of the company means she has a lot of opinions, but she says she often tries to keep them to herself. “I am a believer in empowerment,” she says, “and as CEO, you will fail if you are engaged in everything. It is all about choices and where you spend your time.”

During the pandemic, Castlight has literally been guiding people to care with the launch of their COVID-19 Test Site Finder, which quickly became the most comprehensive testing database in the country.

“As CEO, you will fail if you are engaged in everything. It is all about choices and where you spend your time.”

“Healthcare was already complicated and opaque. What has been stunning is that the complexity has increased as opposed to decreased over the last twelve months,” says Maeve. At the onset of the pandemic, the company recognized the need to help people navigate the confusion around COVID-19 testing locations and quickly pulled a team together to build and launch the search tool within weeks. In addition to the right technology, creating (and now maintaining) the test site finder site required significant manual work, including regularly calling individual sites to confirm information in a constantly changing environment.

“Healthcare was already complicated and opaque. What has been stunning is that the complexity has increased as opposed to decreased over the last twelve months”

Despite this, team members from across the company’s departments came together to work on the test site finder, recognizing its importance. Today, the tool is integrated into Google search, used by innovative companies such as Forward, and utilized by state health departments, including the New York State Department of Health.

When asked about how else COVID-19 has impacted Castlight’s path forward, Maeve highlights three major changes, among many, affecting care navigation: increased adoption and awareness of virtual care, a build-up of deferred care, and a spotlight on the need to treat vulnerable populations in a different, more personalized way. Readiness to adopt virtual care, broadly defined to include telemedicine and digital point solutions focused on areas like behavioral health or diabetes, dramatically increased in 2020. “That really broadens the set of choices that people are making about how they take care of themselves outside of the traditional bricks and mortar system,” Maeve says. Using their platform, Castlight helped employers to launch program management campaigns and target populations to see how they might better support employees who benefit from these virtual solutions. Based on their own claims data, the company also published several studies related to deferred care, including cancer screenings and pediatric vaccinations, during the pandemic. “There are a lot of unknowns,” says Maeve, “especially about the consequences of things like missed vaccinations or screenings. It’s really important from a data perspective to know who that population is.” Using their broad database, Castlight is also able to help employers identify vulnerable populations, such as those with underlying chronic conditions or gaps in medication, and help communicate to them what to do in the case of COVID-19.

As a new CEO faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, Maeve says she is lucky to be at a company where she is surrounded by smart people and feels incredibly supported by the company’s board. Despite the company being in a transformation phase since she took over as CEO, the team was still able to achieve their four primary goals for 2020, one of which was building out their health plans business. “We had set those goals,” she says, “and they were not going to change. It was how we were going to achieve them that needed to change. If I were choosing my first year as a CEO, it would not have been at the top of my list to expect a pandemic,” she laughs. “I was very fortunate to have the support I needed and separately to be in an industry where there is enough opportunity to really adapt and find new ways to still achieve your goals.”

It is also not lost on Maeve that beyond being the CEO during a tumultuous year, she is also one of the few female CEOs in healthcare. Women represent fewer than 15% of healthcare CEOs and less than 35% of the industry’s C-suite. Maeve’s advice to women aspiring to be in positions like hers is to find mentors and managers invested in your growth and career. She says having a strong network of supporters as a female leader was particularly important as it allowed her to take risks and have resiliency through difficult situations. “There are studies on the need for female leaders to take risks in order to advance, and [recognizing] this is something that has helped me personally.” She also suggests always trying to work on what is most important for the company. “Running to the fire, you are always going to find yourself amongst people that have done the same,” she says. “Fire situations are when the bonding occurs and relationships develop.”

“There are studies on the need for female leaders to take risks in order to advance, and [recognizing] this is something that has helped me personally.”

Maeve says her other observation since becoming CEO is many women aspire to be leaders and have a seat at the table, but don’t necessarily see themselves as CEOs or vocalize that goal. “It was never an explicit or even secret goal for me,” she says. “What that has translated to for me is an increased sense of responsibility to rising women leaders to help mentor them and help them see a growth path that does not include artificial boundaries or ceilings, which unfortunately is still very often the case. I’m incredibly lucky to have had mentors and managers who helped me rise to this role, and I would like to be doing the same.”

A decade-long tenure also means Maeve had a front row seat to the company’s growth journey. “There is just so much education that comes from each phase,” she says. “When you are in hypergrowth it’s about the balance of alignment between sales and product.

“I have the opportunity to see and hear how we impact the employees, their families, and health plan members. Those are very real and personal stories. When you stay close to the impact, it’s easy to stay motivated.”

Going through an acquisition – we purchased Jiff in 2017 – some of the learnings there you read in a book, but they don’t translate the same in real life. And then when you are in a transformation, and an incredibly visible one, you really learn how to motivate people and how to motivate yourself.” When asked what motivates her to stay in healthcare she says: “I have devoted all of my career to this space, and there is still so much work to be done, but it really feels like we are starting to have some breakthrough moments. Especially at Castlight, I have the opportunity to see and hear how we impact the employees, their families, and health plan members. Those are very real and personal stories. When you stay close to the impact, it’s easy to stay motivated.”

Based on an interview by Poorwa Godbole on January 8, 2021