The morning is largely us. The afternoon is largely AIS. The day is designed around understanding your world, not pitching ours.
Senior practitioners across strategy, healthcare, and AI — the people responsible for this work.
Recognized among North America's leading management consulting firms.
Among consulting firms in our peer group, year over year.
Decades of strategy, operations, and growth work across the entire care delivery, payer, and life-sciences value chain.
Why we are here today
We have heard a clear vision from Simon: an IG business growing at three times market, with the front end of patient onboarding still carrying friction that constrains every downstream gain. Today is about understanding that vision in depth, in your words, before any solution is sketched.
Most of the day belongs to AIS. We will spend most of the day asking, observing, and learning. The morning frames who we are and how we approach work like this. The rest of the day belongs to you.
Five themes from the conversation with Simon — reflected back in plain language. Today we test, refine, and add to them with you.
A picture of the terrain
Four numbers that describe the world AIS competes in — independent of any single firm's data.
Specialty therapy from referral to ongoing care. Every step is its own coordination problem — capable of losing time and patients on its own.
Friction lives inside every role and in the gaps between them. Both have to move.
Decades of strategy, operations, and growth work for healthcare's most complex organizations.
Practice areas relevant to AIS
Trusted by health systems, national payers, life sciences companies, and the private equity firms that own them — across decades of strategic and operational engagements.
Edward leads the healthcare and AI practice. Most engagements blend both.
Edward Sharpless, D.Sc.
Two decades leading healthcare initiatives at scale. The pattern is consistent — learn the domain fast, design the operating model, build the platform, and put it into production.
Three programs built shoulder-to-shoulder with physicians and the practices around them.
Same problem class as AIS: independent referring physicians, fragile referral relationships, growth without alienating the practices that drive the business.
Regulated patient access at national scale, with multi-stakeholder coordination across exactly the kinds of relationships AIS lives with.
I have literally written the investment thesis for specialty pharmacy at health-system scale.
— not a hype statement. a literal one.
Four kinds of expertise applied together. Most teams have one or two. The combination is what makes work like AIS's possible.
How an engagement like AIS's typically comes together. Familiar shape — but we ship.
The Ontological Reconstruction Method · four phases, no inherited assumptions.
The method is the same across industries. The work is always specific to the business.
Before we touch any system, we make the meaning explicit.
This is what we mean when we talk about an ontology. It is concrete work. It is the precondition for everything else.
Four working principles that shape every engagement we take on.
The pivot of the day
Everything before this slide was earned by the morning. Everything after this slide belongs to AIS.
Eight areas to explore together. The front end gets the most time — that is the project.
Most of today is conversation. We listen. We map. We learn what is specific to AIS.