Head of Strategic Affiliations & Ecosystem Partnerships, Strategy Office
About Chartis
The challenges facing US healthcare are longstanding and all too familiar. We are Chartis, and we believe in better. We work with more than 1,900 organizations annually to develop and activate transformative strategies, operating models, and organizational enterprises that make US healthcare more affordable, accessible, safe, and human. With more than 1,450 professionals, we help providers, payers, technology innovators, retail companies, and investors create and embrace solutions that tangibly and materially reshape healthcare for the better. Our family of brands—Chartis, Jarrard, Greeley, and HealthScape Advisors—is 100% focused on healthcare and each has a longstanding commitment to helping transform healthcare in big and small ways. Believe in better.
Chartis has offices in Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., and Nashville.
Remote work is allowed.
Role Overview
The Head of Strategic Affiliations & Ecosystem Partnerships is an enterprise strategy leader responsible for designing, governing, and activating Chartis' external ecosystem strategy in line with Chartis’ enterprise strategy. Reporting to the Chief Strategy Officer, this executive will build a disciplined portfolio of strategic affiliations that accelerates enterprise growth, strengthens Chartis' differentiation, and improves measurable client outcomes.
The primary objective of this role is to position Chartis as a trusted curator, integrator, and outcome-accountable activation partner across the healthcare technology and innovation ecosystem. The executive will work with the Executive Leadership Team to identify solution areas and business segments that may benefit from a more robust affiliation/partnership.
The role will manage affiliations across technology companies, AI-native platform companies, hyperscalers, healthcare technology and tech-enabled services firms, law firms, banks, venture capital, select academic and innovation partners, and strategically relevant industry associations. The objective of these affiliations is to extend Chartis’ client impact across AI activation and adoption, workflow redesign to optimize performance, and measurable value realization.
This person will connect this ecosystem directly to Chartis business unit leadership, product and technology leadership, AI and digital leadership, and enabling functions including legal, finance, marketing, and risk management.
Responsibilities
Enterprise Ecosystem Strategy
- Develop and execute Chartis' enterprise affiliation strategy in partnership with the Chief Strategy Officer, Office of the CEO, business unit leadership, and product and technology leadership.
- Define the role partnerships should play in Chartis' growth model, solution portfolio, product roadmap, AI-enabled delivery model, market positioning, and enterprise value creation.
- Prioritize partnership domains based on Chartis’ strategic agenda, client demand, outcome economics, implementation feasibility, business unit pull-through, and Chartis' right to win.
- Create a multi-year roadmap for partnership development, activation, governance, and value capture across the firm.
- Serve as the enterprise point of integration for partnership strategy across Chartis business units, centers, practices, segments, and enabling functions.
Partner Portfolio Design and Vetting
- Design and maintain a rigorous partner evaluation framework that distinguishes high-value strategic partners from referral relationships, opportunistic vendor relationships, and lower-priority ecosystem contacts.
- Evaluate partners based on prioritized criteria including but not limited to commercial fit, long-term financial viability, leadership quality, track record of success (clinical or operational evidence, customer reference quality, deployment track record); responsible AI governance, and data rights.
- Work with Chartis business unit leaders and product and technology leaders to determine where Chartis should build, where it should partner, and where it should integrate across multiple partner solutions.
- Ensure the partner portfolio supports priority domain areas as defined by Chartis corporate strategy.
- Maintain a disciplined partner map that includes preferred partners, emerging candidates, watch-list companies, and off-ramp criteria for underperforming partners.
- Develop co-selling, co-marketing, joint solution development, and executive-access strategies that accelerate business development while preserving Chartis' independence and objectivity.
Product, Technology, and AI Integration
- Work closely with the CSO and other identified Chartis ELT members to connect external partnerships to Chartis' product roadmap, proprietary IP, AI capabilities, data assets, and technology-enabled delivery agenda.
- Identify where partner capabilities should be embedded into Chartis solutions.
- Support development of cross-ecosystem data and benchmarking assets, including vendor performance analytics, outcome attribution models, deployment risk indicators, and category readiness diagnostics.
- Ensure responsible AI expectations are embedded into partner evaluation, client deployment, local validation, drift monitoring, bias testing, model governance, incident response, and human-in-the-loop safeguards where relevant, working with product and technology leadership.
- Coordinate with product and technology leadership to evaluate APIs, integration models, data rights, interoperability, security, privacy, and scalability before partners are introduced into client-facing solutions.
Executive Relationship Management and Commercial Negotiation
- Maintain executive-level relationships with strategic partners, including C-suite, founder, investor, legal, and commercial leaders.
- Negotiate strategic and commercial agreements, including joint go-to-market arrangements, co-development agreements, referral structures, revenue-share models, data-rights provisions, preferred partner terms, and outcomes-based or gainshare structures.
- Lead executive business reviews with priority partners, including performance, pipeline, client outcomes, innovation roadmap, issue resolution, and future opportunity development.
- Coordinate with Chartis legal, finance, risk, and business unit leadership to ensure agreements are commercially attractive, compliant, operationally feasible, and aligned to client interests.
- Represent Chartis externally as a senior enterprise leader with strategic partners, investors, and other ecosystem stakeholders.
Governance, Independence, and Risk Management
- Establish a firmwide partnership governance framework that clarifies decision rights, partner tiers, approval thresholds, disclosure requirements, data-rights standards, and ongoing performance expectations.
- Protect Chartis' advisory independence by ensuring that client recommendations remain client-best-interest first and are not overridden by partner economics.
- Implement mandatory disclosure of material commercial relationships with recommended partners, in plain language, before client recommendations are finalized.
- Maintain separation of duties between partnership development and client-specific recommendations, with engagement teams retaining the ability to recommend non-program partners when client needs require it.
- Create a quarterly quality-review process to evaluate whether partner recommendations were appropriate independent of Chartis' commercial relationships.
- Establish partner off-ramp procedures for underperformance, client dissatisfaction, governance concerns, acquisition risk, financial instability, or misalignment with Chartis standards.
Outcomes, Measurement, and Ecosystem Intelligence
- Define performance metrics for the partnership portfolio, including revenue contribution, advisory pull-through, strategic pipeline, implementation impact, client outcomes, partner satisfaction, and governance compliance.
- Build an evidence base of partner performance across deployments, including throughput improvement, revenue-cycle impact, access gains, adoption measures, productivity lift, financial improvement, and other outcome measures relevant to client commitments.
- Identify emerging technologies, regulatory developments, market shifts, and new partnership categories that should influence Chartis' strategy, product roadmap, and business unit priorities.
- Support development of thought leadership, market positioning, and executive narratives that reinforce Chartis' role as a rigorous, independent healthcare technology ecosystem curator.
Partnership Office Operating Model
- Design and build the operating model, team structure, governance cadence, and management routines required to scale Chartis' partnership program across the enterprise.
- Chair or co-chair a cross-functional Partnership Council with representation from strategy, business units, product and technology, AI and digital, legal, finance, risk, marketing, and client leadership.
- Create repeatable tools, templates, playbooks, partner scorecards, business-review materials, and approval processes that improve speed, consistency, and governance.
- Partner with talent leadership to identify capability gaps required for partnership-enabled delivery, including product, implementation, AI, informatics, integration, data, and change-management skills.
Qualifications and Desired Skills
- Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree preferred
- 15+ years of executive leadership experience in corporate strategy, enterprise partnerships, technology, digital health, corporate development, or a closely related field.
- Demonstrated success building and scaling enterprise partnership strategies between consulting firms, larger providers or large payers and technology companies across complex, matrixed organizations.
- Deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem, including providers, payers, healthcare technology, digital health, and AI-enabled platforms.
- Experience working with senior executives across technology companies, AI-native firms, health systems, payers, investors, and other strategic ecosystem participants.
- Proven ability to translate external relationships into business strategy, revenue growth, and measurable client outcomes.
- Experience negotiating complex strategic and commercial agreements, including joint go-to-market, co-development, data-rights, referral, revenue-share, and outcomes-based arrangements.
- Strong working knowledge of responsible AI and healthcare contracting considerations.
- Executive presence and communication skills appropriate for CEOs, Boards, founders, investors, and C-suite client leaders.
Preferred Experience
- Prior leadership role in a healthcare consulting firm, technology-enabled services company, digital health company, AI platform company, healthcare investor, or large healthcare enterprise.
- Experience partnering with or evaluating frontier AI companies, hyperscalers, enterprise software platforms, healthcare AI vendors, EMR-adjacent platforms, and data infrastructure companies.
- Experience building partnership governance models that protect independence, manage conflicts, and maintain client trust.
Salary range: $200,000 - $275,000, plus may be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. The salary range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions, including, but not limited to, skills, experience, training, licensure and certifications, practice area, and other business and organizational needs. In addition, Chartis offers several benefits including medical, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, disability insurance, life insurance, 401(k) match, paid time off, wellness stipend, and additional voluntary benefits.
At Chartis, we pride ourselves on having a diverse workforce. We value and celebrate the uniqueness of individuals and the different perspectives they provide. We offer equal opportunity employment regardless of race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability status, age, marital status, or protected veteran status.
