Bridgework Collaborative
Curating market insights | Convening lasting connections.
Fractional consultant for healthcare innovators navigating payer and provider partnerships, solution refinement, and value-based care strategy.
Start a ConversationBridgework is a platform for connecting problems and solutions, with integrity.
Every engagement starts the same way: listening.
Max stays genuinely close to his network -- providers, payers, and innovators -- not to pitch anything, but to understand what they are actually up against. That intelligence informs everything. When a solution fits a real problem, and the people are ones Max knows, likes, and trusts, he makes the connection.
That's the practice. A connector of problems to solutions. A convener of people worth knowing.
From that foundation the work takes shape: market intelligence, positioning assessment, materials refinement, and warm introductions when the fit is real. Engagements are project-based or advisory, with compensation structures that align incentives on both sides. One or two clients at a time, by design.
If something here resonates, the best next step is a conversation.
For early-stage health innovators navigating payer markets, value-based care strategy, and go-to-market. Typically Series A or actively fundraising with a seed round behind them.
Helping innovators build the payer and provider relationships that turn good models into contracts. Six-plus years on the payer side means knowing how health plans think, what makes them move, and where good intentions get stalled. Facilitating provider partnerships when market entry depends on clinical relationships, not payer contracts.
Strategy and advisory for organizations working in rural and frontier markets. Built programs serving rural communities across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Utah.
Convening and leading human-centered design processes for complex healthcare challenges. Staying close to the problem and keeping the work connected to operational reality.
A convener of human-centered innovation in healthcare, Max Holfert has spent the last decade at the intersection of provider partnership innovation, care delivery redesign, and organizational change. His work has spanned value-based payment design, contracting, complex care, and health system strategy.
Max was born and raised on an island in rural Alaska, where hard work and community reliance weren't optional. That upbringing shaped how he approaches the work he does and how he shows up in partnership with his clients, colleagues, family, and friends.
Prior to his decade-plus in healthcare, Max ranged more than most: through commercial fishing, construction, entrepreneurship, lending, community development finance, and management consulting. He draws on that breadth of experiences as an advantage — an innovative systems thinker who loves complexity and doesn't get stuck in any one lane. He is always looking to learn and apply his experience to the next new challenge.
Max holds an MBA in Innovation Management from Portland State University, including an international elite 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. Published in the Journal of Clinical Pathways; featured speaker at: the Value-Based Payment Summit, National Alliance of Healthcare, and upcoming Oregon Rural Healthcare Conference. He lives with his family on a rural working farm in Oregon's Willamette Valley.
Organizations Max has worked with
Retainer, project, and advisory engagements considered. Working with a limited number of clients at a time.