Evan
Kletter.

Ron and Judi Kletter started BAART - the Bay Area Addiction Research and Treatment program - in 1977, in a San Francisco that was still figuring out what to do with heroin. The clinic predated the modern term "opioid crisis" by roughly four decades. It used methadone when methadone was controversial, and stayed with it when fentanyl made the math harder.

Evan was the son who went into the work and stayed. His brother Jason Kletter would become President of BayMark Health Services. Together, the two Kletters today sit at the top of one of the largest medication-assisted treatment networks on the continent. The org chart, if you draw it, looks like a family tree that grew sideways into healthcare infrastructure.

Chapter Two The training before the title

Before he was CEO, Evan Kletter earned his doctorate in psychology from Alliant International University. He was, and is, a clinician first. The Ph.D. matters here because BAART was never built like a private-equity rollup with a clipboard executive at the top. It was built like a clinic, then another clinic, then a small chain - each location run with the assumption that the person walking in the door has been failed by the healthcare system before and probably will be again. That assumption shaped procurement, hiring, intake, billing. It is not a posture you can fake with an MBA.

He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1991. Two decades later, USF asked him to join the Board of Trustees. He accepted, in 2014, and has since contributed to the school's Presidential Commission on Health Professions. In 2022 he returned to deliver the Crawford Lecture at the School of Nursing and Health Professions, on the opioid crisis - the topic, by then, he had been operating against in real time longer than most policymakers had been thinking about it.

Chapter Three The acquisition that didn't end the job

In 2015 BAART was acquired. The new parent rebranded as BayMark Health Services. The standard founder script at this point reads: cash check, take a board seat as a courtesy, take up cycling. Kletter took the board seat. He did not take up cycling. He continued to participate in the strategic direction of the company - 100-plus clinics across the U.S. and Canada do not run themselves, and his brother running the operating company is presumably easier to coordinate with when both of you are still in the room.

What gets lost in the company-history version of all this is the patient. BAART's clinics serve indigent populations - the people for whom the cash-pay private addiction-treatment industry doesn't really exist. The expansion under Kletter happened in places where you can lose money easily and lose patients faster. The fact that it scaled - and is still scaling under BayMark - is not an accident of capital. It is an accident of decades of people deciding to show up.

Chapter Four The pivot to windows

Most executives in their third act take a consulting role and start a podcast. Kletter took a job at a startup that makes screens that look like outside. LiquidView sells digital windows - large, ultra-high-resolution displays that show 24-hour outdoor views synced to the local sun. They go in places that don't have real windows: senior living facilities, hospitals, offices, the back rooms of healthcare buildings. He is the company's Vice President of Health Evidence.

The phrase "health evidence" is doing a lot of work in that title. Stanford's Zeitzer Circadian Research Lab studied the product. Early data, announced around CES 2025, showed measurable effects: roughly a 5% reduction in heart rate and a 40% drop in electrodermal activity when participants viewed the dynamic 24-hour view versus still images. These are small numbers that compound. Kletter's job is to make sure the people deploying them - facility directors, healthcare administrators - know what the numbers mean and what they don't.

It is, viewed sideways, the same job he had in 1995. Take a clinical intervention. Prove it works. Get it into the places where the population it could help is most concentrated. The intervention used to be buprenorphine. Now it is a 24-hour view of the Pacific Ocean. The discipline is identical.

Chapter Five What the public record shows, and doesn't

Evan Kletter is not loud online. His public profile is essentially: a LinkedIn entry, a Crunchbase page, an Org chart card, and a small number of lecture appearances. He does not write op-eds. He does not give the keynote at the conference. The people who run his industry know who he is. The people who don't run his industry mostly don't.

This is a recognizable pattern. The operators who actually move addiction medicine forward in the United States rarely show up in profile pieces. The field rewards quietness. Patients in recovery have not, historically, been well served by their clinicians turning into media personalities. Kletter appears to have absorbed this lesson early and never gotten over it.

Chapter Six The through line

If you squint at three jobs - clinic operator, USF trustee, evidence chief at a hardware startup - you can find one thread. Each role sits at the intersection of evidence and access. Each one asks: we have a thing we believe works. How do we get it to the rooms where it would actually matter? Methadone in a clinic at 18th and Mission. A nursing curriculum at a Jesuit university. A digital window in a memory-care unit. The answer is never the same. The question is.

Evan Kletter is what an entire profession sometimes lacks - a builder who didn't leave when it stopped being new. He is forty-eight years into a story that started before he was named CEO of anything, and he is still showing up. The clinics his parents started are open today because he made a series of decisions, over decades, that the work was worth more than the title attached to it. The work, on most mornings, was probably worth more than the title anyway.