The Strategist in Brief: August 6, 2026

This week’s edition includes a What’s Next Digest for Q4 that covers policy predictions post-midterms, Oscar Health’s growth, and AI spend trends, plus two M&A announcements.

This week’s episode covers CEO Forum insights on affordability and AI, the HRSA 340B rebate pilot launch, CVS 340B lawsuits, Medicaid work requirement delays, and operating margin trends. 

In this episode of The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch, Dennis Thé, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Children's Health System of Texas, walks us through how the leading pediatric system in North Texas decides where to grow. Children's Health serves about one million patients a year across two campuses and is building a $5 billion campus in partnership with UT Southwestern. Dennis explains what makes pediatric growth decisions different from adult ones, why the system evaluates growth across its full portfolio rather than site by site, how that thinking led them to move their inpatient rehab unit from Dallas to Plano and convert the freed-up capacity into NICU beds, and how community need shaped the services at the Redbird Specialty Center south of Dallas. 

This week's episode covers the shifting musculoskeletal care landscape, AI use case ROI data, Ascension's Mercy Care sale to Aetna, and Counsel Health joining the ACCESS Model with Oura. 

This week's episode covers how strategy teams use generative AI, physician alignment strategies, CEO tenure benchmarks, and Johnson & Johnson's new 340B claims data requirement. 

 This week's episode covers Epic's new Ergo Visit platform and Ochsner's early experience, rising employer health costs, and a MyChart phishing scam targeting seniors.

In this episode of The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch, Ricky Bloomfield, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Oura, walks us through the company's partnership with Counsel Health, which connects Oura members to a board-certified physician asynchronously without leaving the app. We cover what Oura was seeing in consumer behavior that pulled the company toward care delivery, why they built the experience around messaging rather than video visits, and Dr. Bloomfield's perspective on how consumers are actually using AI in their own health. 

This week, our quarterly What's Next Digest offers four predictions on payer mix headwinds, 340B claims-data mandates, AI-enabled cyberattacks, and OpenEvidence's health system expansion. 

 In this episode of The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch, Shoeb Sitafalwalla, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Advocate Health, walks us through care model engineering, Advocate's approach to designing care models with a product lens across one of the largest health systems in the country. We cover how a post-merger discovery process led his team to rethink what a health system's core product actually is, what it looks like to run care models through a product pipeline with stage gates and a 100,000-patient pilot minimum, and how the reusable architecture they've built took them from a 10-month first product to launching every three to four weeks. 

This week's episode covers Amazon's evolving One Medical strategy and health system partnerships, physician specialty happiness survey results, and HHS's delay of the HIPAA Security Rule update.