LOS ALTOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alto Neuroscience today announced the appointment of Andrew Dreyfus, former president and CEO of BCBSMA, to the company’s board of directors as an independent board member. Mr. Dreyfus brings decades of experience in health insurance and healthcare reform to support the advancement of Alto’s late-stage precision psychiatry pipeline.
“Andrew has devoted his career to improving the quality and accessibility of healthcare, and his appointment to Alto’s board provides great validation of the clinical significance of our precision approach from a payer perspective,” said Amit Etkin, M.D., Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of Alto. “His unique experience at the intersection of insurance and policy will be invaluable as we continue to build our clinical development strategy. The ability to find the right patient for each one of our drugs opens up the long-desired goal of value-based care in psychiatry, where drug prescription and reimbursement is tied to clear health outcomes.”
Mr. Dreyfus previously oversaw BCBSMA, a plan with $9 billion in revenue, three million members, and 4,000 employees. Under his leadership, BCBSMA has been consistently recognized as one of the nation’s best health plans for member satisfaction and quality. Mr. Dreyfus joined Blue Cross in 2005 as Executive Vice President of Health Care Services, where he led the creation of the Alternative Quality Contract, one of the largest commercial payment reform initiatives in the nation. Prior, he served as founding President of the BCBSMA Foundation, where he led the development of the “Roadmap to Coverage.” That multi-year initiative led to the passage of the state’s landmark 2006 Health Reform Law, which resulted in the lowest uninsured rate in the country and later became the model for the Affordable Care Act. Prior to Blue Cross, Mr. Dreyfus was Executive Vice President of the Massachusetts Hospital Association and held several senior health and regulatory positions in Massachusetts state government.
“I am honored to join the Alto board of directors at such a pivotal stage in the company’s development, coinciding with a time of continued unmet need in our country’s mental healthcare,” added Andrew Dreyfus. “I am deeply committed to the joint mission of helping people get better faster and look forward to supporting the company’s goal of redefining psychiatric care to maximize impact for patients.”
Mr. Dreyfus currently serves on the boards of the Joint Commission, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, and the BCBSMA Foundation, which he chairs. He serves on numerous advisory boards, including Ariadne Labs and the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California (USC). He is also an adjunct lecturer in health policy and management at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
About Alto Neuroscience
Alto Neuroscience is pioneering precision psychiatry by developing targeted medicines to help patients get better faster. Differences in individuals’ biology impact how they respond to treatment. Alto’s Precision Psychiatry Platform™ measures brain biomarkers by analyzing EEG activity, behavioral task performance, wearable data, genetics, and other factors to match each patient with the right Alto drug. The company’s work in identifying and categorizing core domains of mental function (cognition, emotion, and sleep processes) has resulted in a multiple modality approach that supports robust drug-response predictions. Alto’s clinical-stage pipeline includes first- or best-in-class novel drug candidates in depression, PTSD, and other mental health conditions, resulting in the broadest and most-advanced precision psychiatry effort. For more information, visit https://www.altoneuroscience.com or follow us on X (Twitter).
