2025 tested healthcare organizations in new ways, and it tested us too. This reflection looks at what we learned alongside our clients, why ClearTurn is evolving, and how we're building a consulting firm designed for what 2026 actually demands.
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Consulting years are rarely quiet. But this past one had a different kind of energy, the kind that forces you to take stock of who you are, what you stand for, and what your clients truly need from you. It was a year that revealed as much about the market as it did about ourselves, and in that sense, it became the ideal backdrop for launching our new brand.
This is a look back at 2025 through our own eyes, and more importantly, a look ahead at what 2026 demands from firms like ours.
Across the healthcare landscape, 2025 was unforgiving. Health plans, providers, employers and government all faced sustained financial pressure, operational strain, and difficult trade-offs. Premium dynamics lagged rising medical costs, internal teams were stretched thin, and layoffs created a whiplash effect. The work remained, but the people who knew how to do it often didn’t.
We watched organizations struggle with the impossible physics of “do more with fewer people and fewer dollars.” And they turned to us in ways they hadn’t before.
Some needed classic ClearTurn help. A regional payer asked us to support an integration after acquiring another plan. A service organization brought us in for vendor sourcing and contract work. A regional health plan needed to steady itself after multiple leadership departures drained institutional knowledge.
But some came to us for something subtler: perspective. Steadiness. Operators who know when a messy change curve is normal and when it signals a deeper issue. Leaders who know when to slow decision-making rather than accelerate it. People who can walk into a room in the middle of a storm and say, “Let’s not make this decision today. Let’s make it once the dust settles.”
That kind of trust is earned, not assumed.
One of the themes of this past year surprised even us: clients hiring ClearTurn for one thing and discovering, mid-engagement, that our capabilities stretched far wider.
In one case, a health plan brought us in to support system selection and contracting. We did exactly what we were hired to do: sourcing, negotiation, governance, and benefits realization. Then implementation began, and it became clear the organization needed sustained operational leadership to carry the work forward. We are now spending a year or more alongside their team, helping implement the very system we helped them select.
A services organization hired us for an operations assessment. By the end, we were running point on sourcing, vendor performance, and workflow redesign.
A client in the pharmacy benefits space asked us to build a go-to-market playbook. Months later, we checked in. Not only were they still using it, they had refined it, expanded it, and turned it into the department’s operating backbone.
This became the repeating pattern of 2025: clients discovering ClearTurn was a consulting firm hiding in plain sight.
The biggest myth about consulting is that it’s divided into two camps: strategists in one corner and implementers in the other.
Our work sits in the space where those worlds meet. Every leader on our team is wired the same way: give us a strategy and our brains immediately run to “Great. How does this actually work on Monday.” Or “Great. That won’t work unless we change X, Y, and Z.”
This instinct is what lets us bridge the gap that many firms leave wide open.
The market seemed to need more of that this year. We embraced opportunities we would have declined two years ago. Negotiating a major UM outsourcing contract. Standing up cross-functional governance structures. Supporting cost-of-care analytics. Cleaning up vendor billing and recovering overpayments. And increasingly, helping executives understand how and when AI should be used in their organizations.
This wasn’t about rebranding ourselves as generalists. It was about recognizing that ClearTurn’s operating mindset applies across the enterprise. If a problem requires systems thinking, accountability, cross-functional execution, and financial discipline, we can solve it.
A rebrand became necessary not because the old brand was broken, but because it no longer expressed who we had become.
ClearTurn started as a group of experienced operators helping clients who trusted us personally. Word-of-mouth drove nearly everything. Relationships mattered deeply, and still do.
But then we noticed the pattern: people hired us, but still didn’t always understand what ClearTurn could do.
As we grew, as we built a broader bench, as we led larger and more complex engagements, the brand no longer matched the substance of the firm. We were stepping into rooms we hadn’t been in before and needed something that spoke on our behalf before we said a word.
We often joke that our clients hire us because of who we are as people: unpretentious, direct, collaborative, and reliable in the messiest moments. The new brand needed to feel the same way. Clean without being sterile. Welcoming without being casual. Professional without being corporate.
Our hope is that clients see the new brand and think, “This feels exactly like the ClearTurn team I know.”
Some challenges in this market are easy to name. Others sit just beneath the surface.
1. Cost-of-care pressure is eclipsing everything else.
For years, plans squeezed administrative budgets until there was nothing left to squeeze. Leaders are finally acknowledging that true financial recovery requires tackling the cost of healthcare, not just trimming overhead. This is where the next wave of impact will be found.
2. Knowledge loss is becoming a silent crisis.
Layoffs removed capacity, but more importantly, they removed institutional memory. We saw organizations repeat mistakes simply because the people who learned the lessons were no longer there. This is where capability-building matters.
3. Vendor management is badly underdeveloped.
We were asked several times this year to fire a vendor. In most cases, the issue wasn’t the vendor. It was the client’s governance, communication, performance management, or invoice validation. Many organizations simply don’t have the muscles for proactive vendor oversight.
4. AI overwhelm is real.
Executives know they need an AI strategy. They don’t know how to separate meaningful opportunities from shiny distractions. They don’t know when AI is the right answer and when it is absolutely not. They need a trusted advisor, not a tool pitch.
These themes will shape the kind of problems ClearTurn helps solve in 2026.
Three shifts define where we’re headed.
A more proactive posture.
We spent much of 2025 deeply embedded with clients. Later in the year, that intensity revealed a gap: we had extraordinary people who became underutilized as engagements naturally wound down. We are addressing that directly by investing more consistently in visibility, storytelling, and pipeline development.
A clearer point of view.
We are putting a stake in the ground around the capabilities that define ClearTurn:
A thoughtful expansion of our bench.
We remain selective by design. But we now have a broader network of senior operators we trust and can deploy quickly. That allows us to take on work we once turned away simply due to capacity constraints.
If ClearTurn becomes famous for anything in the next three years, we hope it is this:
Clients often tell us, “You feel like part of our team.” We take that seriously. We know their pressures, their internal politics, and the vendor invoices they dread opening. Some relationships extend beyond the work itself. That trust is not accidental. It is the foundation of everything we do.
The rebrand is not a departure from this. It is an extension of it.
If 2026 goes well, you will see a ClearTurn that is both familiar and expanded.
And most importantly: we will continue to do the kind of work that outlasts the engagement.
The kind that leaves an organization stronger the day we walk out than the day we walked in.
Not because of a slide deck, but because of a system, or a contract, or a process, or a governance structure, or a playbook that the client continues to use, maintain, and improve.
That has always been the real measure of success.
The brand is new. The work is not.
But now the two finally match.
