By | Kevin Thilborger and Carlie Cody
No single team owns growth in healthcare, but every team influences it.
Marketing teams are building campaigns to grow priority service lines. They’re looking at audience behavior, channel performance, and how to move patients from interest to action. At the same time, managed care teams are evaluating how contracts perform, where reimbursement is lacking, and which populations support margin. Revenue strategy or business development teams are working from a broader view, assessing market share, competitive position, and where growth will translate into financial performance.
All of that work is happening at the same time, often with different inputs shaping each plan.
In some organizations, revenue strategy comes closest to seeing the full picture. It connects market opportunity with internal capabilities and financial outcomes, and that perspective tends to carry well into revenue-focused decision-making. It doesn’t always travel as far into marketing, where demand plans continue to take shape based on audience and channel dynamics without full visibility into how service line priorities align with access or how payor mix shapes value. In real terms, this might mean the loudest physician gets more attention than the revenue he drives would warrant. Or an organization might purchase a billboard because the competition just put one up.
How often are those teams working together to learn where their decisions overlap?
There’s real opportunity here — where market insight, contract performance, and demand generation begin informing each other before execution.
The trap: precise strategies built without a shared definition of growth
Each team builds a plan that works within its own context. Marketing improves engagement and conversion. Managed care strengthens contracted rates and operational efficiency to protect margin. Revenue strategy or business development identifies where the organization should grow and how that growth contributes financially. Operations manages access, throughput, and collecting what is owed.
In some of the best organizations, marketing has become highly precise. Targeting continues to improve, campaigns optimize in real time, and conversion performance strengthens. Most organizations can consistently reach the audiences most likely to engage and schedule care, and that capability shows up clearly in campaign performance.
However, many organizations don’t require these teams to work together before implementing an overall strategy. Thus, it’s possible for one part of the strategy to be working while another is failing and nobody can quite figure out why.
What changes when teams define growth together
Organizations that address growth planning and implementation together bring a shared definition of growth into the planning process. They establish which service lines represent true growth priorities, which patient populations contribute to margin, where capacity exists, and how success will be evaluated across teams.
Marketing continues to build campaigns, managed care continues to manage contracts, and revenue strategy continues to set direction. Each function retains its role while working from the same set of plans and expectations. Campaign planning reflects both demand and financial contribution, and service line decisions reflect both market opportunity and operational readiness. This should help avoid financial surprises later in the year. For example, marketing ran successful campaigns that drove patients into the system, but for services that were all reimbursed at less than cost!
Precision remains a strength, but it becomes more useful when it operates within a shared definition of what the organization is working toward.
Where health risk assessments (HRAs) strengthen patient acquisition and health literacy
When teams are working from shared priorities, early-stage patient engagement tools start to contribute more across the organization.
Health risk assessments (HRAs) give patients a simple way to understand symptoms, assess risk, and decide what to do next. They build health literacy by translating clinical complexity into something usable in the moment. When connected to scheduling tools and care pathways, they help patients move into the system faster and with more confidence.
They also generate structured data — symptoms, intent, and readiness to act — that reflects what patients are actually experiencing. When that data ties back to service line strategy, payor mix, and campaign priorities, it starts to drive decisions, not just reporting.
HRAs already engage and guide patients effectively. More teams benefit from that work when HRAs connect to the same priorities shaping growth, access, and financial performance.
What this looks like in practice: connecting HRAs to outreach, data, and care delivery
CHRISTUS Health applied this approach to preventive breast cancer care by connecting HRAs, digital outreach, and care navigation into a coordinated workflow.
Digital campaigns and outreach efforts brought patients into the experience, but the HRA served as the point where interest became something more actionable. It captured structured clinical and behavioral information, including family history, lifestyle factors, and readiness for care. That information flowed directly into CRM and call workflows, allowing follow-up to reflect each patient’s situation rather than a generic response.
Patients moved forward based on their risk and readiness. Some were prompted toward genetic screening or mammography. Others received follow-up aligned to earlier-stage risk factors that might not meet standard screening criteria but still warranted attention. Care navigation teams were able to prioritize outreach, personalize conversations, and guide next steps without adding complexity to internal workflows.
The results reflected both engagement and downstream impact:
- 1,900+ HRAs initiated
- 1,200+ completed assessments
- 68% lead capture rate (vs. 37% national average)
- 63% completion rate (vs. 35% national average)
- 48% of participants prompted for genetic risk follow-up
- 20% prompted to schedule a mammogram
- 520 total patients attributed to the campaign, including 94 new patients and 42 new breast cancer patients
What stands out is how the system behaves when these elements connect. Outreach, assessment, follow-up, and care delivery operate together, allowing patients to move forward based on real need while aligning with clinical priorities and operational capacity.
What connected revenue strategy changes across access, experience, and financial performance
When these pieces come together, the effects are visible.
Demand shows up where access exists. Patients move through intake and scheduling with fewer barriers and often with better overall impressions. Teams spend less time reconciling different views of performance and more time acting on shared priorities. Financial outcomes reflect where volume is coming from, how it performs under contract, and how it contributes to overall margin.
The improvement comes from how existing capabilities work together.
The opportunity sitting just beyond the edges of revenue strategy
Healthcare organizations already have the expertise required to grow.
The teams are in place.
The data exists.
The tools are working, maybe just against each other.
The opportunity is in how often those pieces come together for one overall plan. When they do, growth becomes more intentional, execution reflects how the organization actually operates, and results show up across experience and financial performance at the same time.
That’s where additional value starts to appear — just beyond the edges of how most strategies get built today.
Kevin Thilborger is Chief Managed Care and Chief Revenue Strategy Officer and Carlie Cody is VP of Health Risk Assessments for Unlock Health.
