GT Independence has appointed Chris Karkenny as chief executive officer. The company, which is based in Sturgis, Michigan and provides financial management services to people who direct their own care, announced the appointment on 31 August 2026 and did not give an effective date. Karkenny joins from NVISION Eye Centers, where he had been chief executive officer since 2018.
The appointment sits alongside a wider settlement of the company's leadership. John Carmichael, who founded GT Independence and led it as chief executive, continues as a member of the board, and his family retains an ownership interest in the business. D. Pearl Barnett, who was promoted to president in November 2025, remains in that role. The company did not identify an outgoing chief executive in its announcement.
Karkenny has more than 25 years of leadership experience, most of it in healthcare. He led NVISION Eye Centers from 2018 until this appointment, a period of eight years. Before that he was executive vice president and chief financial officer of Apria Healthcare, and earlier in his career he held leadership positions at PacifiCare Health Systems and at Coram Infusion Services. He holds a BSBA from the University of Richmond and an MBA from Pepperdine University.
GT Independence works in the self-directed model of care, under which people receiving support choose and manage their own workers rather than take services from a traditional agency, and the company handles the financial administration that the arrangement requires. Its role in that model is administrative rather than clinical: it manages the payments and the paperwork that allow an individual to act as the employer of their own care workers. The company says it serves more than 60,000 people who are self directing their care in more than 21 states.
The appointment brings in a chief executive whose career has run through managed care, home healthcare services and eye care rather than through self-directed care itself, which suggests the board recruited for general operating and financial management experience rather than for familiarity with the sector. His longest recent tenure, eight years as chief executive of NVISION Eye Centers, and his earlier period as chief financial officer of Apria Healthcare, sit on the provider and payer side of healthcare rather than in publicly funded long term support. The continuity arrangements point in the same direction: the founder remains on the board, the founding family keeps an ownership interest, and the president appointed in November 2025 stays in post, which keeps operating knowledge of the business close to the incoming chief executive. On the company's own figures, more than 60,000 people served in more than 21 states, the business Karkenny takes on is national in scope.
