Boston Globe – In 2019, when Corbin Petro helped get Waltham startup Eleanor Health off the ground, she and her two female cofounders found themselves working with a board of directors that was pretty typical for a startup: four white men.
Petro wanted to change that, and it was a chance encounter with another chief executive over drinks that motivated her to do it.
Earlier in her career, she had worked as chief operating officer for Massachusetts Medicaid, and ran a health care joint venture in New Hampshire that involved Harvard Pilgrim. Eleanor Health focuses on the estimated 20 million Americans with substance use disorders, aiming to provide medication and mental health services virtually and at 28 in-person clinics. The company is paid by insurers, with the goal of reducing the cost of serving those patients. That can happen, for instance, by driving down the number of visits to emergency rooms — the so called value-based health care model.
