Resources - Unlock Health

Resources

Unlock Health has deep experience in managed care consulting, revenue strategy, contract performance and negotiations, benchmarking, analytics, and strategic communications

Managed care under pressure: what’s shaping 2026

As healthcare affordability worsens, patients, providers, and payors are responding in different ways. Explore the five forces shaping managed care in 2026.

The annual state of change: why 2026 will test our capacity to activate, not just to change

Learn why many transformations stall quietly and how leaders can build the activation capacity needed to turn change into sustained behavior in 2026.

2025 in managed care: the year the quiet parts got loud

In managed care, 2025 wasn’t shocking. It just made the system’s problems harder to pretend not to see.

What to expect in 2026

The pressures shaping managed care now determine how patients seek care, how providers deliver it, and how payors control it.

Perspective: When a town hall becomes the headline

Unlock Health's Brian Storts and Rick Toller write that when a town hall meant to build alignment becomes the headline, it reveals something deeper about organizational change.

What comes next: How providers can prepare for the next era of payor economics in 2026

The burden to justify value is being shifted from the insurer to the provider.

The ups and downs of payor coding practices: how upcoding and downcoding both undermine trust

Payors are inflating patient risk scores to boost their payments from federal programs while adjusting provider claims to pay less.