Brett Hudspeth Puts Relentless Curiosity to Use at Humana

Every time Brett Hudspeth thought it might be time to start looking around for his next big challenge, one emerged right where he was at Humana. Over nearly fifteen years and at least nine different titles, Hudspeth has helped ensure that any part of the healthcare insurance business within his digital purview operates as seamlessly as possible for both members and internal clients.

The current IT Vice President – Core Admin and Claims and Segment CIO – Medicare, a technology leader who also holds a law degree and two economics degrees, keeps evolving his responsibilities and finding innovative ways to serve more people both inside and outside Humana.

Along with those opportunities, Hudspeth says the work his organization does makes it very hard to consider ever leaving. Early on, he remembers a letter making its way to his team. A Humana member credited the organization with reminding her that she needed to schedule a colonoscopy, and had she not, her medical team wouldn’t have caught early-stage colon cancer as early as they did. She said Humana saved her life, and as Hudspeth has continued to change roles, he’s never had to change his broader connection to that life-saving mission.

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Although his title sits squarely in technology, Hudspeth frames his “secret sauce” as an almost stubborn commitment to seeing everything from the customer’s perspective. In Hudspeth’s world, the word “customer” has multiple layers, members, and patients of course, and, more immediately, the Humana employees who touch the systems his teams deliver every day.

“Most of what my organization builds is invisible to our members,” Hudspeth says. “But it completely shapes their experience. It’s an important part of my job to think about that experience. Our claims systems, prior authorization tools, and back-office platforms are used by Humana employees every single day, and the more we can use technology to to make any interaction more accurate and timely the first time around, the better we can serve our members.”

With a large business-partner organization and transaction counts easily into the hundreds of thousands per day, even small gains in efficiency and accuracy of each transaction can deliver meaningful benefits to Humana’s members.

“Most of what my organization builds is invisible to our members. But it completely shapes their experience. It’s an important part of my job to think about that experience.”

Brett Hudspeth

Hudspeth’s legal training and economics background give him a distinctive lens on modernizing technology inside a highly regulated, high‑volume business. Rather than being enamored with “new” for its own sake, he talks about matching tools to purpose. Mainframe systems still excel at the high‑volume, high‑accuracy processing needed to adjudicate hundreds of thousands of claims a night, but they are not ideal for powering modern digital experiences or real‑time data access—places where newer, cloud-based APIs and web-based portals excel.

His approach is to keep battle‑tested systems where they perform best, and modernize at the edges where members, providers, and associates interact. That means building clean, secure, well‑governed data layers that sit between legacy cores and contemporary digital tools, so clinicians, call‑center advocates, and members can see what they need instantly without waiting on a monolithic back‑end.

“For more than a decade, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with Brett—a leader whose calm, decisive approach consistently turns challenges into opportunities. He sets a high standard for leadership and continues to drive meaningful progress in healthcare transformation. We are proud to be his partner on this journey,” says Prashant Sethi, Vice President of the Cognizant Healthcare Business Unit.

The same pragmatism guides his philosophy on where Humana should invent and where it should adopt. He points to earlier eras when the company built custom systems for functions like HR or CRM, solutions tailored perfectly to Humana’s internal language but demanding constant in‑house reinvention, versus more recent moves to adopt widely used commercial platforms and redirect internal energy toward work that is uniquely tied to caring for members.

Evaluating whether a capability is secret sauce or commodity has become part of his modernization philosophy. If a function is highly differentiated and central to Humana’s value proposition, his teams will design and engineer around it. If thousands of other companies solve the same problem in similar ways, he would rather buy a mature platform, integrate it well, and focus scarce talent on the nuances of Medicare, Medicaid, and care delivery.

The next twelve months will be dominated by modernization efforts across every piece of Hudspeth’s portfolio. In practice, that will mean continuing to make systems more flexible, more interoperable internally and externally, and more resilient from both an operational and security standpoint, while keeping a clear line of sight to how each change makes life better for members and associates.

It will also mean pushing further on data discipline and designing experiences that respect the complexity of programs like Medicaid across multiple states, specialty plans, and local markets without burying users under that complexity.

Whatever form those efforts take, one can be sure Hudspeth will continue to grow in new ways, even outside of work. The VP is a bona fide tech enthusiast, still writing code off the clock and tinkering with the latest and greatest gadgets. A father and husband, Hudspeth remains restlessly curious, but he has found the right employer for that journey, one that enables him to continue to seek out new problems to solve.

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