Richard Afable didn’t stay retired for long.
The prominent Orange County healthcare industry veteran who stepped down as chief executive of St. Joseph Hoag Health in Irvine in December, recently took the chief executive role at Newport Beach-based Concierge Key Health LLC, a 1-year-old startup firm that created a mobile app for on-demand access to medical specialists.
The new role marks a big switch in organizational size for Afable, who while at the Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian unit helped run Orange County’s largest health system, with more than 5,000 employees.
Concierge Key, by contrast, employs only about 15 people.
Its executive roster, while small, includes several healthcare industry notables, such as Robert Grant, the company’s former chief executive. Grant—whose resume includes stints as president of Bausch & Lomb’s surgical unit in Aliso Viejo, and president of Allergan’s medical aesthetics division in Irvine—will remain chairman of the board.
Afable “will continue to build on our vision to transform the healthcare experience and set a new standard in ease, access and quality for today’s discerning consumers,” Grant said in a statement.
The company also announced a new chief commercial officer, Jenna Anderson, who worked for Allergan and at Irvine-based Alphaeon Corp., which along with Concierge Key are affiliated with Newport Beach-based investment firm Strathspey Crown LLC.
In September of last year, Strathspey Crown, which also operates as SCH-AEON LLC, brought on Afable for a senior advisory role to help Concierge Key launch its on-demand healthcare concierge service app.
Concierge medicine is a system whereby patients pay an added fee in exchange for more personalized care and better access to their primary doctors. The business model began in the mid-1990s.
Work in Progress
The Concierge Key mobile app launched its beta testing product a year ago, starting with 12 locations. Membership was free.
It remains a work in progress, Afable said.
Members wanted “something more fitting with [their] total need rather than a piece of it,” he said.
The app must cast a wider net, capturing not just specialists but also healthcare providers that span the “entire continuum of care.” Concierge Key members will be able to access doctors within the network more readily, including not having to wait to get an appointment.
Afable said there are many important elements, in addition to specialty care, that constitute members’ lifetime needs, including primary and integrative care.
He said the company is pausing market expansion while some of the app improvements are made.
Anderson said the aim is creating a platform that speaks to any age, from millennials to the older demographic.
She told the Business Journal that concierge models today allow patients a “relationship with one primary care doctor but that relationships stop there.”
“For many of us, we see more than just one primary care doctor,” she said, naming specialists, acupuncturists and chiropractors as examples of practitioners across the “continuum of care.”
Relaunch
Afable said the platform also plans to incorporate what he calls “care coordination,” or member services that answer questions, such as what, where and how, for certain treatments.
Grant told the Business Journal in an earlier interview that the service would officially launch in Orange County, New York and Phoenix, charging fees of $3,000 for individuals and $5,000 for families with up to three children under age 26.
Afable said the company hasn’t started charging membership fees and that it hasn’t set a fee for the revamped product. He said expanding its platform is about better serving members and their needs, and that it wouldn’t necessarily translate to more expensive fees.
He said it plans to develop a new continuum-of-care platform over the next six to seven months and will use Orange County as its test market.
History
Concierge Key, while a stand-alone company, is closely connected with Strathspey. The investment firm runs a portfolio that includes other healthcare, social media and clean-energy related companies. Its healthcare investments also include other private-pay businesses, such as Alphaeon.
Strathspey was built on money raised from physician investors. It owns World Physicians Organization, a platform used to vet physicians interested in joining Concierge Key.
