Amanda Zuravnsky: Why I joined Castlight Health

This post was authored by Amanda Zuravnsky, SVP of Growth

After more than 20 years in healthcare, you develop a filter.

You learn which companies are solving real problems and which ones are solving slices of problems. You learn to recognize when a product is interesting and when it actually has the potential to reshape how the market works.

That filter is exactly what led me to join Castlight Health.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked across the healthcare ecosystem, from payer to employer to digital health innovators. Most recently I served as Chief Growth Officer at Carrot Fertility, helping scale one of the fastest-growing benefits platforms in healthcare. Before that, I spent years working alongside employers and health plans trying to improve the healthcare experience for millions of people.

And across all of those roles, one truth kept showing up:

Employers and health plans are investing more in healthcare than ever before but the experience for people using those benefits still feels fragmented.

Programs live in different places. Navigation is disconnected from care. Data is scattered across vendors. Even when organizations invest in great solutions, employees often don’t know where to start or how those solutions work together.

The result is a benefits ecosystem that’s powerful, but difficult to activate.

That’s the problem Castlight solves.

Turning healthcare investments into action

Castlight sits at the center of the healthcare experience.

For more than a decade, the Castlight platform has helped employers and health plans connect benefits, navigation, and care into a single place where members can actually understand and use what’s available to them.

Instead of asking people to navigate a maze of programs, Castlight brings everything together in one intelligent experience that guides members toward the right care, the right benefit, and the right support at the right time.

That might sound simple, but at scale it’s incredibly hard to do.

It requires deep integrations with health plans, benefits programs, clinical services, and ecosystem partners. It requires a platform that understands claims data, benefit design, and population health. And it requires a member experience that people actually want to use.

Castlight has quietly been doing exactly that for years.

Today the platform supports millions of members across many of the country’s largest employers and leading health plans, including several Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations. These partnerships aren’t surface-level technology integrations. They represent long-term collaborations built on trust, outcomes, and the ability to deliver results at scale. 

The most meaningful is the expansion Castlight has seen amongst these partnerships; adding services offerings on the employer side, expanding coverage to new groups and lines of business in health plans and deepening engagement with all populations. That doesn’t happen by chance. That’s real customers, seeing value delivered by Castlight, and going deeper in their partnership.

That foundation is what convinced me this was the right place to build.

Where the market is going

Healthcare is entering a new phase.

For the past decade, innovation focused on creating better point solutions. And many of those companies have built excellent products. But employers and health plans are now facing a new challenge.

How do you make all of those investments work together?

The next chapter in healthcare innovation isn’t about adding more vendors. It’s about orchestrating the ecosystem so members can actually use what organizations have already purchased.

That’s where Castlight’s platform becomes incredibly powerful.

Over the next phase of the company’s journey, we are focused on expanding how the platform helps organizations activate and optimize their healthcare strategies.

That includes:

• AI-powered navigation embedded directly into the member experience.
• Members receiving more personalized guidance and support, helping them make better healthcare decisions in real time.
• Deeper analytics for employers and consultants.
• Benefit leaders gaining clearer visibility into engagement, health trends, and program performance so they can make smarter decisions about their ecosystem investments.
• An expanded ecosystem of partners.
• Employees accessing best-in-class solutions across the healthcare landscape through a single personalized experience.

These capabilities built on to Castlight’s foundation of navigation and advocacy is what makes it unique.

Navigation and care, connected

Castlight has a primary care delivery arm, Vera Whole Health as well as a partnered care delivery relationships across the US through Aligned Marketplace, and independent providers in multiple states. That connection enables something most navigation platforms cannot deliver: a direct link between digital navigation and advanced primary care.

Instead of stopping at recommendations, Castlight can help members take the next step into coordinated care through Vera’s advanced primary care model or any of their partner organizations.

When navigation and care are connected, the healthcare experience becomes dramatically more effective for both members and employers. And that’s where the industry is heading.

Why this matters

Growth in healthcare is not just about revenue.

It’s about expanding access to tools that help people make better decisions about their health.

Every new employer, health plan, and member who joins the Castlight platform represents an opportunity to simplify healthcare navigation, improve outcomes, and create a better experience for the people relying on these systems.

That’s the mission I’m excited to be part of.

If you’re building something in this space, whether you’re a health plan, an employer, a broker, or a fellow operator thinking about where the industry is headed, I’d love to connect. My door is open.