Former Expedia/Vrbo Chief Technology Officer John J. Ostlund Joins b.well Connected Health

Company also adds a former Health Catalyst data science leader and creates a new role for CTO Philips Johnson

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Sep 16, 2020, 07:55 ET

BALTIMORE, Sept. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- b.well Connected Health, the platform designed to provide consumers a new front end to healthcare, announced the expansion of its senior team with the addition of two notable technology industry leaders – Chief Technology Officer John J. ("JJ") Ostlund and Chief Information Officer Imran Qureshi.

John J. ("JJ") Ostlund is Chief Technology Officer of b.well Connected Health.

Ostlund brings to b.well three decades of technology innovation and business leadership in Fortune 100 companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing and Honeywell, as well as a long history of advisory roles within tech startups across multiple industries. Most recently, he was the CTO of Expedia Group's global vacation rental platform, Vrbo®, where he led a team of product engineers and scientists in perfecting an online marketplace serving millions of travelers with millions of vacation rental homes. Ostlund earned the CTO role after serving as Senior Vice President of Technology for Expedia before the company's acquisition of Vrbo in 2015.

At Amazon, Ostlund led the evolution of the company's e-commerce platform services for third party partners. Before that, he spent a decade at Microsoft, including as GM of product, engineering, and operations for Windows Live mobile services and platforms.

"I have a bias for big bets that have the potential to influence the lives of millions and I'm excited to join b.well, a young company with disruptive technology, inspired talent, and a mission that I believe in," said Ostlund. "At Amazon and Expedia we were able to bring millions of consumers and suppliers together in a two-sided online marketplace by creating standards in the background. b.well is analogous to that in its mission to give consumers a single hub to manage their healthcare journey and to personalize the experience by applying AI and machine learning to the data. It's that mission of transforming healthcare that brought me to the table and I'm honored to join the team to help accelerate, scale, and grow the company."

Current b.well CTO Philips Johnson, one of the company's first team members, has been promoted to Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, an expanded role where he can leverage his deep expertise in health data interoperability and product strategy to further extend the capabilities of the b.well platform. Johnson is widely regarded as a leading technologist of third-party applications promoting consumer-directed healthcare. Through his work with stakeholders such as the CARIN Alliance--a non-partisan collaborative working to enable consumers to access more of their digital health information with less friction--he was a significant contributor to the development of the new interoperability standards adopted this year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

"Healthcare is undergoing a rapid digital transformation across the industry," said Johnson. "Keeping b.well at the forefront of this transformation, helping push the industry forward at-large, and redefining how individuals can digitally interact with their healthcare is a challenging but exceptionally rewarding mission that I couldn't be more excited about leading here at b.well."

b.well also announced that Imran Qureshi has joined the company as its first Chief Information Officer. Qureshi was previously Chief Data Science Officer of Clarify Health Solutions, a pioneer in machine learning-enabled care optimization. Before that, Qureshi was chief software development officer for Health Catalyst, a provider of data and analytics technology, where he led the engineering team that built the company's Data Operating System (DOS). Prior to Health Catalyst, Qureshi held roles such as CTO of Acupera, a care coordination platform for clinical and socio-behavioral care and Vice President of Engineering at CareAnyware, the largest SaaS provider to home health care and hospice agencies.

"I've worked in healthcare for over 12 years in companies serving the provider, payer, and life sciences markets, and everywhere I've gone the question remains the same: 'how do we enable consumers to take control of their health?'" said Qureshi. "That's the missing piece and the great appeal of b.well is that it enables that goal."

b.well CEO and Founder Kristen Valdes said of the leadership changes, "I'm thrilled that JJ Ostlund has chosen to join b.well. He is a national expert in double-sided marketplaces, which is a key part of our strategy moving forward, and he brings decades of experience delivering complex and innovative products with a consumer and B2B focus. I'm also excited to welcome Philips to his new role building out an innovation and labs team to support moving the industry forward with b.well in the lead. And we are fortunate to have a leader of Imran's broad experience who is uniquely qualified to extract data from healthcare and develop meaningful insights that drive meaningful action."

Valdes continued, "We are sitting in the middle of a transformational shift in how our country delivers healthcare, and history will remember this as the time when healthcare adapted at lightning speed to meet urgent consumer needs. I am excited about our new leadership team, about our future, and I know that together we can deliver the superior experience all healthcare consumers want and deserve."

About b.well Connected Health
b.well is a healthcare technology company providing platform services comprised of five core products that work together to enable health systems, payers, and employers with a configurable and personalized digital health experience for their populations. The b.well technology platform is transforming how people interact with the healthcare system by integrating data, insights, and partners into a single customized solution that helps people take control of their healthcare experience.

Media Contact:
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SOURCE b.well Connected Health