Kevin Benner

Kevin is an healthcare and IT executive of 25+ years who operates at the intersection of healthcare and technology to design, stand up, and optimize innovative health systems and related services. Kevin was the founding CIO for two innovative health plan startups: Definity Health, the pioneer in consumer driven healthcare and did the earlierst work on how to create healthcare consumers; and Bright Health, who created HMO 2.0 where payers and providers are tightly aligned in caring and guiding consumers to healthier outcomes. Kevin’s career in healthcare includes two tours of duty at UnitedHealthcare and Optum, a healthcare TPA, and numerous consulting engagements. While CIO for the behavioral health business at Optum, Kevin’s teams lead the technology enablement for innovations in more holistic care delivery models which spanned behavioral and medical care as well as true collaboration between the payer and select providers. Prior to coming to the healthcare industry, Kevin was a researcher applying artificial intelligence to software development while getting his Ph.D. in computer science at Information Sciences Instuitute at Univ. of Southern California. He extended that work at the Center of Strategic Technology Research (CSTaR) at Accenture where he focused on advanced software development tools and methodologies to support object oriented design, component frameworks and software reuse in general.