Nexcurve · Executive counsel for healthcare leaders

Environment

AI puts unlimited opinions on every leader's desk.

Every vendor, advisor, and AI tool can produce a confident analysis in minutes. The result is an exhausting pile of plausible options, each with a champion. Meanwhile, an aging population, labor shortages, and the shift to value-based care keep pressing on margins and service demand.

Impact

Decisions stall under the weight of opinion.

Your leadership team finds it hard to choose one direction with conviction and hold it under your organization's scrutiny. A strategy your people cannot explain will not win over your board, your physicians, or the payer across the table.

Imperative

Choose one direction before the next planning cycle.

The executive team picks the direction, tests it with people who have made these calls before, and takes one explanation to the board, the physicians, and the payer. We work alongside the team through each of those conversations.

Judgment in practice

Your hardest operating problem may be your biggest opportunity.

Access bottlenecks, leakage, and the rising cost of care are payer problems too. We help health systems turn the fix into a product a payer will contract for, built one milestone at a time so each step earns the next conversation.

→ We have led product innovation on the health plan side, which helps us anticipate what a payer will look for before it signs. The health system is always our client.

Engagements

Our work starts with one decision that sets a health system's direction.

A typical engagement begins when a health system's leaders reach a strategic inflection point and the usual options no longer fit. We work alongside the executive team to choose the direction, build the product and value proposition behind it, and carry the story to the board, physicians, and payers.

AccessA primary care or access model that has to serve more patients without new buildings or more providers.

ProductA new product or service line that needs a marketable value proposition and a plan to take it to market.

PartnershipA payer or employer partnership the health system wants to enter from a stronger position.

Case story

Turning a primary care access problem into a payer partnership

A clinically integrated network that could not build or hire its way out of a primary care access bottleneck asked us to help. In discovery, we found about one-third of office visits at a flagship practice could be handled virtually, roughly sixty hours per physician per month. The network built a virtual-first care model on that number, and a regional payer is co-developing a commercial HMO with it.

Request the case story →

Initial launchA digital front door with a triage chatbot and on-demand virtual clinic.
Expand accessA web version and guest flows for people who were not yet patients.

Billing competencyThe ability to bill insurance.
Expand clinical scopeServices that close gaps in existing primary care relationships.
Practice of the futureA virtual primary care practice; a payer auto-attributed lives to it.

Benefit designA commercial HMO co-developed with a regional payer, built on the model.

SVP, Healthcare Strategy

J. Michael Eaton

To learn, you first have to listen. To provide good counsel, you have to take the time to understand. I have put that time in for more than 35 years. I won’t tell you what you want to hear; I will provide insight on what you need to know to succeed.

Founder and Managing Partner

Michael Alden

Michael led product innovation at UnitedHealthcare, digital strategy at BVK, and physician network analytics at Navvis. He co-founded two healthcare companies, MyHealthDirect and Intellivisit, and helped raise multiple rounds of angel and venture funding. He has seen companies through acquisition and brought products to market that reach tens of millions of people.

Senior Advisor, Physician Enterprise Strategy

Travis Dowell

Most recently, Travis was President and CEO of Memorial Medical Group, a 270-provider multi-specialty network across central Illinois, where he converted multiple locations to rural health and FQHC status.

Senior Advisor, Clinical Technology

Jeff Miller

Jeff founded Navvis Health Care in the mid-1990s, grew it into a category leader in competitive strategy execution, and sold it to Healthways in 2011. He stayed on to help lead Healthways' population health strategy and business intelligence work with large integrated health systems.

Senior Advisor, Brand & Marketing

Shelly Washburn

Shelly led the marketing efforts for a large not-for-profit health system and rebranded a central Illinois-based medical school and academic physician practice into one singular identity.

Meet our leaders →

Approach

Executive counsel, centered on product innovation and payer collaboration.

Executive counsel

Judgment to choose your direction and the story that carries it and holds up under scrutiny.

Product innovation

The product strategy, the marketable value proposition, and the plan to take it to market.

Payer collaboration

Access and cost fixes shaped into products a payer will contract for.

See our approach →

Agility by Nexcurve

Weekly briefs and debriefs for healthcare leaders.

Agility publishes our positions on payment, networks, primary care, and capital. Read a few posts and you will know how we think before we ever meet.

Nov 6, 2026 Your Primary Care Access Problem Is the Start of a Payer Partnership
A primary care access bottleneck is often the best opening a physician network gets to build a partnership with a payer. Here is the five-step playbook I would hand a leadership team starting today.
Nov 2, 2026 You Own the Capacity. Who Owns the Demand?
Healthcare’s next competitive advantage may belong to the company that makes the market.
Oct 28, 2026 Tiered Networks Reward Health Systems That Move First
Employers and payers now rank providers by episode and steer members with copays. Health systems that measure their episodes first protect their position.

Read and subscribe at agility.nexcurve.com ↗

Every advisor and AI tool can hand you another plausible option.