The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch
The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch brings healthcare strategy professionals into the room with leading health system executives to explore how innovation, clinical leadership, and enterprise strategy intersect. Designed for strategy executives, physician leaders, and healthcare innovators, the podcast offers actionable takeaways to help organizations drive both clinical and financial impact.
The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch
The Strategist in Brief: October 23, 2025
This week's episode covers the shifting landscape for CMS innovation payment models, the challenges that the government shutdown poses for AMCs, Amazon Pharmacy's new prescription drug kiosks, and the Hospital for Special Surgeries partnership with General Atlantic to establish a nationwide ASC chain.
This is the strategist in brief for October 23rd, 2025, our abbreviated roundup of the top stories in our newsletter. This week's key market dive looks at the evolving landscape for CMS innovation payment models. The Trump Administration's CMS Innovation Center is pivoting towards cost containment, accountability, and mandatory participation, replacing several legacy models that failed to produce savings. The new agenda emphasizes preventive care. Patient empowerment and fiscal responsibility. Several models are launching in 2025 or the near future under the due administration transforming episode accountability model, a mandatory bundled payments model for inpatient surgeries, the ambulatory specialty model, a mandatory model featuring two-sided financial risk and peer-based performance metrics, wasteful and inappropriate service reduction, a model that brings AI enabled prior authorization to traditional Medicare. And achieving healthcare efficiency through accountable design. A 10 year voluntary state level, total cost of care model, emphasizing prevention, collaboration, and population health. The agency shift signals and ERA where nearly all care segments face value-based risk. Health systems must invest in care coordination, analytics, and physician alignment to thrive as financial risk becomes mandatory across specialties and service lines. Moving on to our market scan. The ongoing government shutdown has frozen research grants installed clinical trials, adding to the policy challenges that AMCs and other research institutions are facing this year. Other challenges include proposed NIH and NSF cuts, indirect cost, caps, cuts to politically sensitive research, graduate education funding changes, new immigration policies and targeted university funding. Feess. Universities and their affiliated AMCs are cutting costs and diversifying their funding sources by leaning on industry partners, state programs, and philanthropic donations. Moving on to our next piece of news, Amazon Pharmacy is adding kiosks that dispense common prescription medications at one medical clinics, much like their strategy in online retail. Amazon is hoping to rapidly gain pharmacy market share by offering consumers maximum convenience and a seamless digital experience. Some health systems have already tried the idea at a smaller scale with third party vendor partners. And now our final piece of news, the hospital for special surgery is partnering with PE firm General Atlantic to acquire Allegiant Health's 12 ASCs and form a national outpatient orthopedic and spine care platform. The deal follows a familiar blueprint for throughway JVs between health systems physicians and private equity firms. The involvement of HSS could help the new AC chain compete with health systems on clinical reputation and quality. That concludes this week's edition. Be sure to check out the full version on the web@hmacademy.com. Thanks for listening.