The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch

This week’s episode covers CEO Forum insights on affordability and AI, the HRSA 340B rebate pilot launch, CVS 340B lawsuits, Medicaid work requirement delays, and operating margin trends. 

In this episode of The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch, Dennis Thé, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Children's Health System of Texas, walks us through how the leading pediatric system in North Texas decides where to grow. Children's Health serves about one million patients a year across two campuses and is building a $5 billion campus in partnership with UT Southwester...

This week's episode covers the shifting musculoskeletal care landscape, AI use case ROI data, Ascension's Mercy Care sale to Aetna, and Counsel Health joining the ACCESS Model with Oura. 

This week's episode covers how strategy teams use generative AI, physician alignment strategies, CEO tenure benchmarks, and Johnson & Johnson's new 340B claims data requirement. 

 This week's episode covers Epic's new Ergo Visit platform and Ochsner's early experience, rising employer health costs, and a MyChart phishing scam targeting seniors.

In this episode of The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch, Ricky Bloomfield, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Oura, walks us through the company's partnership with Counsel Health, which connects Oura members to a board-certified physician asynchronously without leaving the app. We cover what Oura was seeing in consumer behavior that pulled the company toward care delivery, why they built the experience a...

This week, our quarterly What's Next Digest offers four predictions on payer mix headwinds, 340B claims-data mandates, AI-enabled cyberattacks, and OpenEvidence's health system expansion. 

 In this episode of The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch, Shoeb Sitafalwalla, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Advocate Health, walks us through care model engineering, Advocate's approach to designing care models with a product lens across one of the largest health systems in the country. We cover how a post-merger discovery process led his team to rethink what a healt...

This week's episode covers Amazon's evolving One Medical strategy and health system partnerships, physician specialty happiness survey results, and HHS's delay of the HIPAA Security Rule update. 

The CY2027 OPPS proposed rule (340B cut, site-neutral imaging), Cassidy's 340B reform discussion draft, and Optum's negotiations to sell New York specialty practices from Crystal Run. 

This week's episode covers the House vote to defund the WISeR prior authorization pilot, Eli Lilly's 340B enforcement actions, Nebraska Medicine's National Quarantine Unit, and an HHS OIG report on Medicare Advantage prior auth denials. 

THMA-Tegria research finds 82% of systems call access a strategic pillar but most have trouble executing. We unpack the finance gap, post-acute blind spots, and the governance structures that separate progress from priority fog. Resources mentioned in this episode: The Access-Driven Enterprise Report from THMA and Tegria THMA-Tegria webinar featuring executives from Emory, Sutter, and IU Health Ac...

This week's episode covers proposed Medicaid payment caps, insights from chief physician executives, the medical student shortage, Eli Lilly's 340B ultimatum, and a court ruling on Medicare Advantage star ratings. 

This week's episode covers four hard truths shaping AI strategy for 2026, new CMS rules overhauling the ACA marketplaces, Q1 margin recovery, and a six-month moratorium on new home health and hospice enrollment. 

This week's episode covers Q1 hospital earnings, UnitedHealthcare's prior authorization rollback, the proposed CJR-X model, J-1 visa delays, and CMS's Medicaid revalidation push. 

We dig into how St. Charles Health System, a four-hospital not-for-profit in Central Oregon and the sole major provider across a 32,000-square-mile service area, went from seven Medicare Advantage payers down to one and then turned a twenty-year track record of clinical quality into a negotiating tool that cut cancer treatment authorization times from weeks to a single day. Matt Swafford, CFO, and...

This week's episode covers five big ideas from the Spring CSO Forum, CVS's new pharmacy-only stores, Amazon and Walmart's competing GLP-1 programs, Baylor Scott & White's health plan exit, and who's in and out of the CMS ACCESS model. 

This episode recaps three key themes from the 2026 Strategy Catalyst Summit: what it takes to move service line rationalization from theory to action, what a live scenario planning exercise revealed about strategic preparedness, and who should be owning the AI agenda. Watch our highlight reel from the summit here . And for more on the content referenced in this episode, read our analysis in The St...

This week's episode covers the finalized Medicare Advantage rate increase, new research on AI scribes, Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos model and cybersecurity implications, and MedPAC's findings on Medicare Advantage margins. 

This week's episode covers the Sutter Health and Allina Health merger announcement, CMS administrator Mehmet Oz's comments on AI agents for Medicare, key insights from the Strategy Catalyst Summit, and THMA's executive priorities survey results.  

Dr. Peter Newcomer, SVP and Chief Operating Officer at UW Health, walks us through how two organizations that used to compete built a financially aligned, strategically coordinated partnership — without merging. We dig into how the JOA with UnityPoint-Meriter helped UW Health address capacity constraints, delay a major capital build by years, and create a shared patient flow system. 

This week's episode covers the American Medical Association's new maternity payment codes, our new CSO Advisory Council, health system access strategy survey results, and insights on consumer segmentation. 

In this episode, we share highlights from a recent Strategy Catalyst webinar where Liz Jones, Research Director, walked strategy leaders through three disruptors reshaping service lines in 2026 and tested a few intentionally provocative predictions. We cover why payvider M&A slowdowns don't mean reduced threat, what the PE retreat from care delivery means for acquisition timing, and why d...

This week's episode covers Humana's acquisition of MaxHealth, the Trump administration's antitrust appeal, the Supreme Court's tariff ruling, CMS's new ACCESS model rates, and CVS's new GLP-1 drug access service.  

This week's episode covers the end of the proposed 340B rebate pilot, healthcare earnings highlights from HCA, UnitedHealth, and Amazon, the MA rate announcement shaking up payer stocks, ChenMed's new stance on GLP-1s, and Sword Health's acquisition of Kaia Health.