Aware Recovery Care Hires Former Kindred Executive as CEO

A former Kindred Healthcare executive who led the post-acute provider’s innovation efforts and a services division is now the CEO of Aware Recovery Care.

Dr. Brian Holzer said on Wednesday that he had taken over the CEO post of the Wallingford, Connecticut-based in-home addiction treatment services provider in a LinkedIn post. His first day on the job at Aware Recovery Care was Monday, April 18.

Holzer takes over the CEO role from Stephen Randazzo, the co-founder and now chairman of Aware Recovery Care.

Holzer has spent much of his career in the post-acute care space, especially working in leadership positions within home health care and hospice. He spent four years, from 2013 to 2017, as an executive with Pittsburgh-based insurance and health care company Highmark Health and its hospital system Allegheny Health Network. There, he helped build out post-acute services through the launch of Healthcare@Home.

Holzer told Behavioral Health Business in an interview that he plans on bringing a spectrum of coordinated services into patients’ homes.

Specifically, the work of bringing addiction treatment and other recovery and counseling services into the home setting for people seeking recovery and their family members has specific correlates to the hospice industry, Holzer said.

“Since you’re in the home, you’re interfacing with the family and caregivers and support systems so much more directly than you would in any facility-based business and you end up healing the family just as much as you heal the client,” he said.

Holzer announced his departure from his previous role as CEO at Lacuna Health about a month ago on LinkedIn.

Lacuna Health is a patient engagement services provider that was spun up by but controlled by Kindred Healthcare. Its services include, for example, a 24/7 nurse and triage call center, care transition management and remote patient monitoring.

Kindred Healthcare, now known as ScionHealth, sold to Brentwood, Tennessee-based LifePoint Health in a deal that closed at the end of 2021. Lacuna Health is now part of the LifePoint Health broader physician services infrastructure.

Holzer joined Kindred Healthcare in June 2017 as the president of Kindred Innovations where he led a division designed to incubate and launch platforms and solutions across Kindred Healthcare and the broader marketplace.

This is the second major leadership move at Aware Recovery Care in 2022. The company announced in February that it had promoted Dr. Andrea Auxier to president after joining the company in May 2021 as chief growth officer.

The company provides addiction treatment and many other supporting services to patients and their families in the home, a stark contrast to the facility-based addiction care industry. By providing care in the home, Aware Recovery Care is attempting to carve out a new avenue of care in the addiction treatment industry.

Aware Recovery Care landed $22 million in Series A funding in January 2021. New York City-based Health Enterprise Partners led the round.

Part of the attraction to Aware Recovery Care, Holzer said, was the involvement of Randazzo, Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Matt Eacott and Health Enterprise Partners Managing Partner Pete Tedesco in the company.

“That was a big selling point for me — to have that mix of a great private equity healthcare services investor and have two founders that were so connected to the mission and want to stay connected to the company,” Holzer said.