Susan Diamond — the Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) executive who has been in charge of building the health insurer’s vast home-based care infrastructure — is taking on an additional role.
The Louisville, Kentucky-based company announced Monday that Diamond will be moving into the interim CFO role, effective June 1. Current CFO Brian Kane is stepping away from his role at Humana “to pursue broader career goals,” according to the company.
Kane — who has had direct oversight of Humana’s care delivery efforts, including the turnaround at Conviva Care Solutions and the growth of Partners in Primary Care — will remain in his current role through June 1. He will then serve in an advisory role through the end of the year.
“We sincerely thank Brian for his invaluable contributions to Humana over the years,” Humana President and CEO Bruce Broussard said in a statement. “He has been an instrumental member of the leadership team, helping to formulate and drive the company’s strategy and create significant shareholder value over his seven-year career with Humana.”
Diamond joined Humana in 2006 and has held various leadership roles across the company since. She spent eight years as part of the Humana Medicare team, plus two years on Kane’s financial team responsible for enterprise planning and forecasting.
“Although we will miss Brian, I am excited about and personally committed to seeing our strategy through to fruition in the coming years,” Broussard added. “Given Susan’s strong knowledge of our business and financial expertise, I have great confidence in her ability to lead the finance team as we recruit a new CFO.”
Humana tapped Diamond to lead its “home business” segment in the summer of 2019 as part of a larger restructuring of the company’s in-home care assets, which include Kindred at Home, Humana At Home and more. The segment was previously overseen by Humana clinical and pharmacy exec William Fleming.
Since then, Diamond has taken point on numerous in-home care plays. Most recently, that includes Humana’s hospital-at-home partnership with Denver, Colorado-based in-home urgent and acute care startup DispatchHealth.
Through the partnership, Humana and DispatchHealth are offering hospital-level care at home to eligible patients in Denver and Tacoma, Washington. The pair have plans to expand the initiative to more markets later in 2021.
“From a dollar-and-cents perspective, we will see lower readmissions. We will see less need for post-acute care,” Diamond told Home Health Care News in February. “This [initiative] takes more of a 30-day episode of care approach, where [DispatchHealth] will continue to watch the member even after their admission and address those things that would otherwise potentially require alternative settings.”
Other home-based care initiatives from Humana include its joint program with Papa, a startup focused on addressing social isolation and loneliness among older adults. The nationwide insurer has also made substantial investments in in-home primary care entities like Heal.
The big-picture reason for having such diverse internal and external home-centric touchpoints is to create a holistic care delivery model that’s free of gaps, Diamond said at HHCN’s 2020 FUTURE conference.
“This was done with the intent of allowing us to accelerate toward a broader ambition around the home, specifically related to home-centered care delivery models,” Diamond explained. “When we formed the new segment, what we decided to do was set [previous strategies] aside and really take a fresh look with a much wider aperture. We formed a new opinion about the range of services that we wanted to make available, again, with a sort of home-centric ecosystem of care delivery assets in mind.”
Before joining Humana, Diamond served as CFO for Smoothstone IP Communications and Prosperitas Investment Partners. She began her career with PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Humana said it has commenced a search “with the assistance of a leading search firm” for the next CFO.
In the meantime, a new office of the CFO made up of Diamond and other members of Humana’s management and finance team is being established “to ensure continued financial discipline and stewardship of Humana’s growth story,” according to the company.
Diamond will continue to serve as segment president for Humana’s home business after she steps into the interim CFO role.
“Given Susan’s strong knowledge of our business and financial expertise, we have great confidence in her ability to lead the finance team as we recruit a new CFO,” a company spokesperson told HHCN in an email.
Companies featured in this article:
