Courtney Murphy is a dynamic health care leader, advisor, and board member adept at leading organizations through growth to scale and profitability. Ms. Murphy recently joined Brewster Ambulance Service as President and Chief Operating Officer, driving growth and performance across the organization’s multiple business lines.
Prior to Brewster, Courtney served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Commonwealth Care Alliance (CCA), over a period of growth and transformation. She led the development of the corporate growth strategy, establishing CCA as a national leader in serving high-need individuals with an industry-leading care model while growing membership by 70% and revenue by 230%. Courtney also led the acquisition of distressed assets in new markets and successfully executed turnaround plans while serving as chairperson of CCA’s subsidiary market boards and as a director of instED, a mobile integrated health solution.
How did your career in healthcare start?
It actually started in public policy, not business. I began my career in the Romney Administration working on Massachusetts’s health care reform — the first in the nation — where we drove the uninsured rate down to under three percent. Being in the room while that model was built gave me a front-row seat to how much impact good policy and good execution can have on real people’s access to care.
Prior to that, I was in the Massachusetts Senate. I started my career as a political junkie. From there I moved into operations and strategy roles in a behavioral health managed care organization, where I really experienced how meaningful missions can improve lives. So it wasn’t exactly chance, but it also wasn’t a lifelong plan. It was that early experience in bridging policy to action that engaged me.
You’ve led multiple successful organizational turnarounds throughout your career. What have these experiences taught you about building resilient teams?
Turnarounds have taught me to appreciate what I love: challenging skeptics, cheerleading for a data-driven outcome, and leading a team to a successful outcome.
To do that, you really need to develop trusted relationships with the leaders and managers doing the work. At CCA, when I took on an underperforming health plan and provider group, the fastest path to margin-positive performance in 12 months wasn’t a spreadsheet exercise; it was getting the team aligned on a shared, honest picture of where things stood and rebuilding belief that we could fix it together. The vision has to include the “why” behind it. I spent a lot of time in the field with teams, building relationships and listening.
You joined Brewster earlier this year as President and COO. What has been most exciting about stepping into the EMS and medical transport space? Where do you see the greatest opportunities to innovate and improve how this type of care is delivered?
What’s been most exciting is realizing how much untapped potential EMS has to become a true front door for community-based and in-home care, not just a transport service. Paramedics and EMTs are already in people’s homes every day, often for the most vulnerable and highest-need patients. That’s an enormous asset that the health care system has historically underused.
The biggest opportunity I see is scaling mobile integrated health and community paramedicine — using EMS as a platform to deliver more care in place.
Having spent years working on care models for high-need populations at CCA and serving on the board of instED, I’ve seen firsthand how powerful it is when EMS is treated as an active partner in a person’s care team rather than just a responsive transportation vendor. I’m glad to be part of a team working to build out in-home and community-based service lines, deepen partnerships with payers and health systems so that value is recognized and reimbursed, and shift the industry’s center of gravity from “moving patients” to “caring for patients where they are.”
What might the WBL network be surprised to know about you?
Outside of work, I sit on my town’s Advisory Board, helping decide how the town invests in things like schools, infrastructure, and public services. It’s a much smaller scale than national healthcare strategy, but it gets me closer to my first love: politics.
