Insights

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• Sutter Health and Allina Health have signed a letter of intent to form a combined system with 39 hospitals and 18K aligned physicians.

  • The 1,500-mile gap between the systems raises questions about systemness and governance, but there are opportunities for synergy in technology innovation, IT, RCM, and purchasing.

  • Diversifying across state lines to form a system with national scale can help diversify policy and market risks.

• On a panel at HIMSS26, CMS administrator Mehmet Oz and other administration officials expressed interest in introducing AI agents to Medicare that could help beneficiaries find providers or select plans.

  • Seniors might not trust AI, but that might not matter if these services and recommendations are pushed on them.

  • Unlike patients, AI navigator agents might not care so much about nonprofit health systems’ brand halo. We’ve raised similar concerns in the past about navigator services for commercial plans like UnitedHealthcare’s Surest.

  • Greater use of AI to detect Medicare fraud could root out bad actors, but false positives could create operational and reputational headaches for providers and health systems inadvertently caught in the crossfire.

• More than 75 strategy team members from 49 health systems joined us at last month’s Strategy Catalyst Summit in Arlington, Va. For this edition’s Key Market Dive, we’re digging deeper into four of our favorite insights and highlights from the sessions.

  • New AI deployments are making a visible impact on key strategic challenges like physician burnout and revenue capture, but they’re also demanding an increasing share of IT and transformation budgets. Strategy teams need to take on big picture questions about governance and vendor selection and can’t simply leave this work up to their IT teams.

  • In a hands-on demo showcasing how platforms like ChatGPT and Claude can be used for strategy work, we saw a wide range of AI fluency among participants. As these tools become more and more capable, strategy teams looking to transform their systems’ AI prowess would be wise to lead by example.

  • In another session, attendees discussed how reframing service line rationalization as a distribution problem can generate more organizational buy-in and sharpen thinking.

  • Stress testing different hypothetical market and policy scenarios can help strategy teams move from a reactive mindset to a more proactive approach in their strategic planning.

• This week’s featured graphic compares responses to THMA’s annual CXO priorities survey across a variety of executive roles.

  • Compared to other roles, CSOs are less focused on revenue capture and more focused on strengthening the workforce.

  • Executives across nearly every role are increasing their focus on AI.

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Before UW Health and UnityPoint-Meriter were strategic partners, they were in court against each other. Now, UW Health's COO wonders whether their joint operating agreement has been more successful than a full merger would have been.

In this episode of The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch, 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.

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We’ve just wrapped up our Strategy Catalyst Summit, where we had the pleasure of seeing more than 75 of our members in person for two days of networking and high-level strategic discussion. Stay tuned for a summary of our favorite insights in a future edition.

• The American Medical Association is replacing bundled maternity payments with a new set of itemized codes, a change that will shift reimbursement from cost-conscious delivery units to more comprehensive outpatient services.

  • Medicaid will likely adopt the changes first, impacting rural and safety-net providers. Many commercial plans might continue to use value-based bundled payments.

  • Redirecting reimbursement to OB specialists and supplemental services could improve the workforce pipeline in the long term, but the new codes will also create new administrative burdens for these providers.

• We’ve assembled an expert panel of health system strategy leaders to help set our research agenda and supplement our insights throughout the year. To introduce our CSO Advisory Council, we asked each of them to talk about “what keeps them up at night” in their role.

  • Answers included state and federal policy changes, the rapid pace of technological change, modernizing core platforms, and separating the signal from the noise.

• Our featured graphic showcases the results of a THMA survey that asked senior executives across a variety of roles about their health system’s access strategy.

  • The vast majority of systems are investing in telehealth and centralized scheduling. Fewer systems are investing in self-service portals, and less than half of systems say they’re modernizing contact centers—possibly due to cost constraints.

• This week’s research recap looks at our favorite insights from two recent case studies detailing how health systems can leverage consumer segmentation to achieve operating model discipline.

  • Behavioral research can often uncover critical gaps between clinical assumptions and real patient perspectives.

  • Turning consumer insights into differentiated service offerings can unlock new levels of operational efficiency and patient engagement.

  • Segmentation needs to be embedded in governance, infrastructure, and multi-year strategy to maximize effectiveness.

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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 distributors—the disruptor that worried this group least—might deserve more attention.

Want to hear the full discussion, including the polls and live Q&A? Access the complete webinar recording on our website here. And for a deeper dive on the Cencora-One Oncology deal referenced in this episode, read our analysis in The Strategist here and check out our disruptor response guide here.

The demand for providers is quickly outpacing the supply - creating significant patient access issues that lead to leakage, burnout, and quality challenges. As recruitment timelines stretch and labor costs escalate, 80% of health systems remain trapped in a cycle of short-term fixes—relying on expensive contract labor and shift incentives.

Structural silos, insufficient or outdated data, and rapid changes in provider expectations have created a workforce storm that short-term fixes alone cannot weather. Hear an exclusive conversation with leading health system clinical and innovation executives that have embraced new workforce planning models that integrate novel, real-time market data; incorporate expertise across finance and operations; and leverage new tools, models, and processes to modernize their workforce planning.

The gap between clinician expectations and health system capabilities is widening. This webinar provides the blueprint for health system leaders to move from "business as usual" to a data-first strategy that secures both the workforce and the bottom line.

Read The Velocity Gap: Why Retrospective Staffing is Failing Modern Medicine

Read The Intelligence Imperative

Speakers:

• Amir H. Barzin, DO, MS, Chief Operating Officer, UNC Health

• Christopher M. Coburn, Chief Innovation Officer, Mass General Brigham

• Charlie Lougheed, Chief Executive Officer, Axuall

Healthcare organizations increasingly cite access as a top strategic priority, yet despite growing investment in digital front doors, telehealth, and AI-enabled tools, many struggle to translate these initiatives into meaningful improvements in access, satisfaction, and return on investment. A key challenge is not lack of technology, but misalignment across governance, operations, and strategy—resulting in fragmented execution and underwhelming results.

This panel brings together healthcare executives and research insights from the Access-Driven Enterprise, a collaborative study conducted by THMA and Tegria. The initiative examines how leading health systems are reimagining enterprise IT and organizational strategy around access, combining THMA's proprietary executive research with Tegria's digital transformation expertise.

Panelists share insights on how leading health systems are achieving meaningful access transformation. The discussion examines the strategic decisions, organizational changes, and implementation approaches that separate successful initiatives from those that underdeliver.

Read the Access Driven Enterprise Report.

Speakers:

• Haley Bolton, Vice President, Access Performance Management, Emory Healthcare

• Jeremy Rogers, Vice President, Digital Marketing and Experience, Indiana University Health

• Andrew Smith, Vice President, Patient Access, Sutter Health

• Steve Nilson, Acting Managing Director (Access and Experience), Tegria

In today's environment, volatility is the norm. Health systems face margin fragility, rising expenses, consumer affordability challenges, policy disruptions, payer retrenchment, and rapid site-of-care shifts that are reshaping strategic footing. This session unpacks those pressures — helping you understand the assumptions health systems are rethinking. We then focus on the levers that will define health system success, including asset-light growth models, operational efficiency that unlocks capacity and revenue, and workforce modernization aligned with AI-enabled productivity. Grounded in the latest Academy data, member conversations, and market sensing, this session equips you with a sharper read on where health systems are headed in 2026 and how to align your commercial strategy accordingly.

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Capacity constraints and reimbursement pressures are pushing health systems to question long-held assumptions about how access should be designed and delivered. In this Strategy Catalyst roundtable, leaders from Cleveland Clinic and Inova Health shared how their organizations are re-envisioning what "right level, right place, and right time" actually looks like in practice.

Building on our Access as a Strategic Product research series, this session featured Dr. Marianne Sumego, Director of Shared Medical Appointments at Cleveland Clinic, and Michelle Vassallo, Vice President of Clinical Operations at Inova Health. Both leaders presented their organizations' access initiatives and discussed how they've worked to unlock capacity without adding headcount, get buy-in from skeptical providers and leadership, prove value when ROI is hard to quantify, and sustain momentum over time.

The conversation also explored how systems can leverage what they already have in place, how to persevere when access work takes years to build, and what's next on the horizon as reimbursement rules and patient expectations continue to shift. Attendees had the opportunity to ask questions and share their own access challenges with the panelists and peer leaders.