DEARhealth Recruits Senior Executives to Accelerate Growth

LOS ANGELES, March 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Supervisory Board of DEARhealth B.V. and DEARhealth Inc., a health tech company focused on AI-powered chronic disease management, announces today the appointment of Willem Houck as Chief Executive Officer, effective April 1, 2021. Houck will succeed in that role Daniel Hommes, MD, PhD, Founder of DEARhealth, who will continue to serve as its Chief Medical & Product Officer as the company shifts gears to apply its ground breaking Machine Learning platform to the clinic. On the same date, Reender Beks will assume the CFO role on a fulltime basis.

Houck has a unique profile that combines senior executive leadership roles in global companies such as Royal Philips with the creation and launching of several innovative healthcare companies. As the Chairman of Philips' global B2B board, he refocused the company to a customer driven organization, starting its cross divisional healthcare, hospitality, and government business units. He co-founded the disruptive Health Care Financial Exchange that standardizes procedures and products to create price and outcome transparency.

Houck initially joined Hommes and the DEAR team as an adviser and was immediately captivated by DEAR's body of science as well as its team of outstanding global industry professionals.

Beks is a seasoned start-up CFO, having successfully managed exits of Forcare to Philips, Sapiens to Medtronic and Nucletron to Elekta. He has been advising DEARhealth for more than a year and now makes a fulltime commitment to the company. His financial expertise has proven invaluable as DEAR is finalizing its product-market fit, while it expects its Medical Device Registration certificate for its commercial product this summer. Beks, a Dutch citizen, spent almost a decade studying and working in the U.S. and is excited to join Houck, a U.S. and Dutch citizen and resident of New York City and Hommes, a Dutch citizen and longtime resident of Los Angeles, California.

"Daniel and the DEARhealth team have built an extremely impressive company and proprietary platform that delivers demonstrably better health outcomes at lower costs with better patient experiences in very challenging chronic ailments, such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Ovarian cancer and end stage renal disease" says Houck. "DEARhealth was founded to solve some of the biggest challenges in healthcare, and I'm honored and excited to contribute to this incredibly important mission."

Hommes founded DEAR in 2013, while a Professor of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), crowning his internationally acclaimed career in Inflammatory Bowel Disease to lead UCLAs efforts in value-based care. In recent years, he built a company of highly skilled employees and a working data-driven care pathway platform that has proven to improve outcomes in a prototype chronic disease resulting in significant cost savings. The care pathway platform is currently in production at several leading hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, in an increasing number of disease areas.

Hommes: "I'm absolutely delighted to have Willem and Reender on board to lead the business so I can focus on my most important role and mission of applying machine learning to the platform in a scientifically robust manner. The appointments signal the readiness of the platform to be adopted in the clinic. During this next development phase of DEAR, my focus will be to operationalize the Care Pathway Experimentation platform (CPEx), which will allow randomized experiments to optimize care pathways for disease-specific health outcomes. With a strong data-science team and medical team we will pioneer this unique approach in partnership with our customers."

About DEARhealth
DEARhealth is a health tech company founded in 2013, by senior University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) medical experts to transform healthcare by using AI-powered care pathways for chronic disease management. DEARhealth is a validated, AI-driven service that has been successfully implemented in large health systems, in disease areas such as inflammatory bowel diseases, epilepsy, and ovarian cancer. DEARhealth's partners include health systems, providers, payers, and pharmaceutical companies globally. Investors in DEARhealth include Philips Health Technology Ventures, Vesalius Biocapital III, the European Investment Fund, and Health Innovations. To learn more about DEARhealth visit www.dearhealth.com or contact [email protected].

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SOURCE DEARhealth Inc.