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: November 6, 2025
This week's edition looks at Intermountain Health's pediatric growth strategy, Ballad Health's lawsuit against UnitedHealth, AI highlights from the HLTH 2025 conference, and a recent Senate HELP Committee hearing on 340B reform.
This is the strategist in brief for November 6th, 2025 for this week's key market dive. We interviewed a leader from Intermountain Health to learn more about two recent initiatives, the construction of a new$1 billion pediatric hospital in Las Vegas, and a$600 million philanthropic fundraising campaign. Favorable state policy changes helped make a Medicaid dependent reimbursement strategy more viable for the new Las Vegas pediatric hospital. Intermountain plans to support academic medicine throughout Nevada to help stand up a workforce pipeline, and a diverse local population will boost pediatric research to create a more intentional strategy around philanthropy. Intermountain combined its charitable foundations into a single entity and funnel funds towards new pediatric facilities and programs. The system also leaned on existing donor relationships to bring new first time donors into the fold. Moving on to our market scans. Valid health is suing UnitedHealth Over claims that the company's Medicare Advantage tactics, including upcoding profit shifting aggressive denials and unreimbursed costs have cost the system more than$65 million over five years. Lawsuits between health systems and payers aren't unprecedented, but previous cases often focused on narrower disputes. A legal confrontation could complicate future contracting talks in Medicare Advantage and on the commercial side. Health systems considering similar moves need to assess their ability to work with alternative carriers in the market. Moving on to our next market scan at the Health 2025 Conference in Las Vegas, artificial intelligence continued to be a major focus with multiple presentations by vendors, health systems, and disruptors. Several health systems gave presentations showcasing AI use cases for disease detection, capacity management, and care coordination, which could help them compete for value-based contracts. Health systems were the most common type of partner for startups attending the conference underscoring the central role that they can play as developmental partners and testing grounds. However, insurers like Humana and tech companies like Amazon also top the list of the most frequent startup partners. Moving on to our final piece of news, democratic and Republican lawmakers at a recent Senate hearing voiced support for three 40 B reforms that would increase provider oversight and crack down on alleged duplicate discount. However, several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed reservations about moving forward with reforms that would financially impact rural and safety net providers already grappling with Medicaid cuts and other fiscal challenges. Health systems are proactively preparing for three 40 B reform by modeling financial scenarios, reevaluating contracts, and investing in compliance. That concludes this week's edition. Be sure to check out the full version on the web@hmacademy.com. Thanks for listening.