News Release

Spok Appoints Christine Cournoyer to Board of Directors

Industry Veteran Has Substantial Experience in Digital Health and Leading Companies with SaaS Business Models

SPRINGFIELD, Va. (March 19, 2020) – Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK), a global leader in healthcare communications, today announced that, effective immediately, it has appointed Christine M. Cournoyer, who most recently served as the Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of N-of-One, Inc., to its Board of Directors. Cournoyer led the transformation of N-of-One from a patient concierge business to a leading molecular decision support company selling to large health providers and leading molecular diagnostic commercial labs. She, along with the efforts of the team, created a HIPAA compliant platform running in the cloud that scaled to interpret hundreds of thousands of molecular diagnostics tests. Cournoyer led a strategic process for N-of-One, resulting in a successful sale to QIAGEN N.V. (NYSE: QGEN; Frankfurt Stock Exchange: QIA), a Netherlands-based leading provider of Sample to Insight solutions, in 2019.  Cournoyer is presently a strategic advisor to digital health companies and is on the Board of Directors of CareDx, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNA), a leading precision medicine company providing solutions for transplant patients.

“We are excited to have Chris join our Board,” said Vincent D. Kelly, chief executive officer. “She is a proven leader in Healthcare IT, with a broad range of strategic, operational, financial and management experience in Software and Healthcare IT. I believe she will make meaningful and immediate contributions as we continue to introduce our new, innovative, cloud-native and integrated communication platform, Spok Go®. Chris understands our value proposition, market and customers, and will have invaluable insights as we develop our software as a service (SaaS) platform to drive and extend Spok’s market leadership.”

Cournoyer has operated in publicly traded companies as well as private, venture-backed companies, moving successfully across industries with software as the common thread. Prior to N-of-One, Cournoyer was Vice President of Clinical Analytics for UnitedHealth Group/Optum. There she was responsible for clinical solutions in Optum and for defining the clinical decision support strategy. Prior to UnitedHealth/Optum she was President and Chief Operating Officer for Picis, a global leader in the Healthcare IT market, offering solutions that bridge both revenue cycle and clinical workflow management for the high acuity operations of hospitals. Her time at Picis culminated in a sale to UnitedHealth in 2010. Prior positions include Managing Director, Database Division, of Harte Hanks, and Vice President of Global Business Transformation and CIO of the IBM Software Group. Cournoyer holds a B.S. degree in Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts, an M.A. in Economics from Northeastern University and is a graduate of the MIT Executive Education Program. She was voted to the Ten Most Influential Women in Technology by Businessweek and to the Top Ten Women in Computing by CIO Magazine.

“I believe that Spok’s strategy is exactly aligned with the needs of healthcare organizations, and I am excited to help the company achieve its full potential,” said Cournoyer. “I believe my deep experience with Software as a Service (SaaS), positions me to assist Spok as they transition to this platform. This is a very exciting time for Spok to capture the large market opportunity to deliver clinical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes.”

The appointment of Christine Cournoyer to the Spok Board of Directors is part of a focused national search instituted by the Board with the assistance of Korn Ferry International in late Summer 2019 to find the best qualified candidates in healthcare information technology as the Company introduces its new cloud-based Spok Go platform for critical in-hospital communications.   Her appointment follows the January appointment to the Spok Board of Bobbie Byrne, M.D., Chief Information Officer of the Illinois-based Advocate Aurora Health System.  Spok also recently announced the formation of the Cybersecurity Committee of its Board of Directors, chaired by Stacia Hylton, an experienced advisor on cyber security matters and former Director of the United States Marshals Service.

The Company also announced that Samme Thompson will be stepping down from the Board of Directors at Spok’s annual meeting later this year and will not stand for re-election. Thompson became a director of Spok in 2004 and is a member of the Compensation Committee and is Chairman of the Nominating and Governance Committee. Prior to the merger of Metrocall and Arch Wireless, Inc., Thompson had been a director of Arch Wireless. Subsequent to Thompson’s departure and the addition of Cournoyer, the Spok Board of Directors will be comprised of nine directors.

“On behalf of myself and our Board of Directors it has been a tremendous honor and privilege to have worked with and learned from Samme over the years. Samme has served as a member of Spok’s Board of Directors since before we started on our journey to pivot from a telecommunications company to a provider of software solutions.  The Board has benefited from Samme’s experience. I am grateful for Samme’s leadership as I worked alongside him to realize our mission to become a global leader in healthcare communications,” said Kelly.

About Spok

Spok, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK), headquartered in Plano, Texas, is proud to be a global leader in healthcare communications. We deliver clinical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes. Top hospitals rely on the Spok Care Connect® platform to enhance workflows for clinicians and support administrative compliance. Our customers send over 70 million messages each month through their Spok® solutions. Spok enables smarter, faster clinical communication.

Spok is a trademark of Spok Holdings, Inc. Spok Mobile and Spok Care Connect are trademarks of Spok, Inc.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act: 

Statements contained herein or in prior press releases which are not historical fact, such as statements regarding our future operating and financial performance, are forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to be materially different from the future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expectations include, but are not limited to, our ability to manage wireless network rationalization to lower our costs without causing disruption of service to our customers; our ability to retain key management personnel and to attract and retain talent within the organization; the productivity of our sales organization and our ability to deliver effective customer support; our ability to identify potential acquisitions, finance, consummate and successfully integrate such acquisitions, and achieve the expected benefits of such acquisitions; economic conditions, such as recessionary economic cycles, the impact of trade disputes, tariffs and other trade protection measures,  higher interest rates, inflation and higher levels of unemployment; risks related to our overall business strategy, including maximizing revenue and cash generation from our established businesses and returning capital to stockholders through dividends and repurchases of shares of our common stock; competition for our services and products from new technologies or those offered and/or developed from firms that are substantially larger and have much greater financial and human capital resources; continuing decline in the number of paging units we have in service with customers, commensurate with a continuing decline in our wireless revenue; our ability to address changing market conditions with new or revised software solutions; undetected defects, bugs, or security vulnerabilities in our products; our dependence on the United States healthcare industry; long sales cycle of our software solutions and services; our reliance on third-party vendors to supply us with wireless paging equipment; our ability to maintain successful relationships with our channel partners; our ability to protect our rights in intellectual property that we own and develop and the potential for litigation claiming intellectual property infringement by us; our use of open source software, third-party software and other intellectual property; our reliance on data centers and other computer systems, hardware, software and satellite networks and telecommunications systems infrastructure (collectively, “IT Systems”) and technologies provided by third parties, and technology systems and electronic networks supplied and managed by third parties; cyberattacks, data breaches, system disruptions or other compromises to our or our critical third parties’ IT Systems (as defined below), data, products or services; our ability to realize the benefits associated with our deferred income tax assets; future impairments of our long-lived assets or goodwill; risks related to data privacy and protection-related laws and regulation; and our ability to manage changes related to regulation, including laws and regulations affecting hospitals and the healthcare industry generally, as well as other risks described from time to time in our periodic reports and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although Spok believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. Spok disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Media Inquiries

Al Galgano
+1 (952) 224-6096
al.galgano@spok.com