IBX CEO Greg Deavens will retire in December

Gregory E. Deavens will retire as chief executive of Independence Health Group in December at the end of five years leading the biggest health insurer in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Independence announced Wednesday.

Deavens, 63, joined IBX in 2017 as chief financial officer and became CEO at the beginning of 2021. During his tenure at the company, its revenue climbed from $16.4 billion to $31 billion through 2023. Much of the growth came from the company’s Medicaid subsidiary.

Deavens led the insurer through the COVID-19 pandemic and broad increases in health-care costs. More recently, he has had to deal with the disruption caused by Highmark, another large Blue Cross Blue Shield company based in Pittsburgh, that started competing in Southeastern Pennsylvania this year.

“This is the right time for me and the company to initiate a leadership transition,” Deavens said. “As Independence builds out its strategy for the next five years, I felt it was best to have a CEO in place who’d be executing that plan.”

Independence will conduct a national search for Deavens’ successor.

“We appreciate Greg’s steady leadership during an incredibly dynamic time in the health-care industry,” Independence board chair Charles Pizzi said.

To help with the transition to a new CEO, Independence promoted Richard Snyder, currently executive vice president for health services, to chief operating officer.

“Rich’s appointment underscores Independence’s commitment to a seamless leadership transition,” Deavens said. “Rich is a very accomplished and respected leader in the company and the communities that we serve.”

Independence employs 14,077 nationally, including nearly 7,300 in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

In an interview Tuesday, Deavens described his top priorities during his tenure as integrating behavioral and physical health and doing more to reduce racial disparities in health care.

The company announced last fall that it had increased by 47% the number of in-person and virtual behavioral health practitioners available to people with its insurance in Southeastern Pennsylvania. “We have not only expanded the total number of providers that we have, but we’ve got a more diverse set of providers,” Deavens said.

The region’s largest health systems and Independence banded together in 2022 to improve racial equity in health care in Philadelphia. The collaboration, called Accelerate Health Equity, uses pilot programs to try out different approaches and share what is learned. The project is focused on 16 areas, including substance abuse, maternal and infant mortality, obesity and diabetes, racism in medical settings, food access, housing, and community violence.

In 2023, Independence joined with 12 Philadelphia-area health systems in an effort to phase out race as a factor in clinical guidelines used to make treatment decisions. Deavens is especially proud of the work done to eliminate a discriminatory measure of kidney function that made it take longer for African Americans to get a kidney transplant.

“We persuaded the lab companies that we do business with, as well as the major health systems, to stop using a measure of kidney function that adjusts it for African Americans,” Deavens said. “As a consequence of that, over 700 people have been added to the transplant list.”

Temple University president John Fry recalled the key role Deavens played in 2022 in bringing together a consortium of health systems and others to drum up more than $50 million in aid for St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, an effort hashed out during a dozen two-hour meetings. St. Chris is a safety-net provider in North Philadelphia owned by Tower Health and Drexel University, where Fry used to be president.

“I think Greg is one of the great civic actors in our city and region,” Fry said Wednesday. “Watching him in action was having a front-row seat to not only a gifted leader, but someone who cares so deeply about health care specifically, and Philadelphia in general.”

Highmark’s entry in the Philadelphia market led to some big changes at Independence.

Independence switched to Dominion Dental from Highmark’s United Concordia for dental insurance. It also moved Highmark to a new provider of backup insurance for employers that pay directly for their employees’ health care. Those moves have gone well, Deavens said.

For more than a decade, Independence had relied on Highmark’s computer systems for back office operations. That didn’t make sense anymore with Highmark as a competitor, Deavens said, so the company developed its own systems and expects to finish moving customers over on July 1, 2025.

“With any of these large, complicated technology changes, you have some bumps in the road, but we haven’t had anything that I would say is broad-based or systemic,” Deavens said.

Deavens serves as board chair at AmeriHealth Caritas, one of the nation’s largest Medicaid insurers. In 2023, Caritas accounted for $23.7 billion of Independence’s $31 billion in revenue.

That business is coming through a turbulent time, because of lost membership after the pandemic and increased use of health services by the people who kept coverage, Deavens said. “I would say ’24 was a challenging year for us in terms of Medicaid,” he said.

He’s confident in new management that he helped bring to the Newtown Square company over the last year.

“The individuals that we have recruited to take the business forward have deep Medicaid experience and deep expertise in the particular functions and subject matters that they are accountable for,” he said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with additional comment and figures on the company’s employees.