Healthcare Strategy & Implementation
Supporting healthcare organizations, payers, and startups to cut through structural complexity and get to outcomes.
Retainer & Project Engagements · Limited Clients Start a conversationOrganizations Max has worked with
The work
AI alone won't solve it. But paired with thoughtful human judgment, it can unlock what has felt out of reach.
Complexity often comes with structural incentives that benefit intermediaries, not the organizations delivering value. Breaking that requires understanding the logic of the system and acting on it, not accommodating it.
Capabilities
Value-based contracting, episodes of care, and bundled payment design. Hands-on payer-side experience helping organizations understand what the financial architecture actually rewards, and how to change it.
Helping organizations identify where they have real leverage, communicate it clearly, and build the partnerships that move programs forward. Particularly useful for startups and growth-stage companies navigating health plan, provider, or community partner relationships.
Getting from agreement to outcomes requires more than a good product. Closing the gap between what a program promises and what partners actually experience, through onboarding design, workflow integration, and the human judgment required to make adoption stick.
AI does not fix broken workflows, it accelerates them. The difference between AI that moves you forward and AI that accelerates the wrong things is human judgment. Helping teams build the discernment and organizational conditions to use AI where it actually matters.
About
Max has spent the last decade at the intersection of health plan operations, care delivery redesign, and organizational change. His work has spanned value-based contracting, Medicaid complex care, episodes of care and bundled payment design, and health system strategy, including an 18-month complex care redesign that restructured how a major regional health plan approached its highest-cost members.
Before healthcare, Max worked in community development finance at Mercy Corps, where he managed a business microlending portfolio and supported small business incubation in underserved communities. Prior to that he worked in financial services and banking, and before that ran his own small business in design-build construction. He started his working life in commercial fishing.
Max holds an MBA in Innovation Management from Portland State University, including an international module at Copenhagen Business School, and has consulted for organizations in healthcare, global development, financial services, and the chemical industry. He is a featured speaker at the International Federation of Health Plans conference in London, June 2026. He lives with his family on a rural farm property in the Willamette Valley.
Contact
Retainer engagements, project work, speaking, or just a conversation. Working with a limited number of clients and always open to chatting.