By Brian Overstreet, Co-Founder & CEO, Arbital Health
Earlier this year, we brought together over 100 of the brightest minds in healthcare to tackle one of the most persistent challenges in our industry: why hasn’t value-based care scaled to match its promise?
The 2025 Arbital Health Summit wasn’t just a gathering—it was a call to action. We assembled payers, providers, policy leaders, and innovators in Nashville to engage in real conversations about fixing risk-based contracting and unlocking scalable, sustainable value-based care. It was an extraordinary day of dialogue, energy, and collaboration.
Like many of the attendees, I left the Arbital Summit energized that we are at a true inflection point for the future of value-based care and convinced that together we share the commitment to systematically align financial incentives to deliver better patient outcomes.
What We Heard from You
Across panels and hallway conversations, a few themes kept emerging:
- The need for clean, real-time data to drive both contract performance and patient care management decisions.
- A strong appetite for AI and predictive modeling, but only if grounded in clinical workflows and validated against outcomes.
- Frustration with fragmentation, whether in member and provider attribution logic, payer demands, or specialist coordination.
- Hope, real hope, that if we design better systems, we can finally scale what works.
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Everyone’s ready to move—but only if we move together.
And let’s not forget the energy in the room. The power of in-person connection was undeniable. Whether our guests were sharing ideas over breakfast or strategizing next moves after the panels, this was a unique space for real collaboration.
My Conversation with Mark McClellanOne of the highlights of the event was the fireside chat I had with Dr. Mark McClellan (Director, Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, Former CMS Administrator, Former FDA Commissioner), a true pioneer in value-based care and patient rights policy, and someone whose leadership at CMS, FDA, and the private sector continues to shape how our industry evolves. |
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Mark reminded us just how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go. He spoke candidly about the foundational flaws in our healthcare infrastructure, including our continued reliance on 20-year-old metrics like fee-for-service claims and patient surveys as the basis for $500B+ in Medicare Advantage payments.
It was a rich, honest dialogue, and I left the stage more convinced than ever that the infrastructure changes Arbital is driving (greater performance transparency, quicker contract adjudication, and aligned data systems) are exactly what the industry needs to fulfill its goals.
Why We Gathered
Travis May and I co-founded Arbital Health to answer a fundamental question: why, if value-based care has been around for 20+ years, has it not yet scaled to fulfill its promise? We believe the answer lies in the fact that risk-based contracting is broken. The terms are complex, the data necessary to track and understand performance is hard to access (and even harder to interpret), and the settlement - or adjudication - process is long, expensive, contentious, and fraught with financial landmines for both payers and providers.
Over the course of the Summit day, we engaged in honest, high-impact conversations about the real-world challenges and opportunities to fix risk-based contracting. From AI adoption and Medicare Advantage trends to operational complexity and patient outcomes, we explored what it will take to solve the contracting issues that are holding back the scalability of value-based care.
Most importantly, we connected with one another in-real-life. While the panels were packed with insights and exceptional speakers, I was even more excited to create a forum for direct connection and interaction from our ecosystem of clients and friends around this critical topic.
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What’s Next? If there’s one thing the summit made clear, it’s this: no one organization, no single initiative, and no one policy will fix this. Value-based care will only scale to impact everyone if we build it together. That means more than just collaboration, it means co-design. From payers and providers to policymakers, technologists, and patient advocates, we need to break down the data silos and align on shared goals, shared data, and shared accountability. |
We need durable partnerships, not transactional ones. We need both aligned infrastructure and aligned incentives. Arbital addresses these systematic challenges by serving as the neutral third-party adjudicator for payers, providers, employers and healthcare partners. Joining Arbital Health’s network represents the mindset shift from competition over savings to coordination in better patient care delivery.
If you joined us in Nashville, thank you! Your energy and insights are driving real impact on patient care. Expect to see more from Arbital in the coming months on new product innovations, partnership opportunities, and research that continue the conversation we started in Nashville. This summit was a powerful start, but it was only the beginning. We will keep the momentum going with invites throughout the year for post-summit live roundtables and webinars.
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With gratitude, |
Explore More Summit InsightsIf you’re interested in exploring the key themes and takeaways from this year’s Summit—including what’s ahead for Medicare Advantage, predictive modeling, AI, and scaling value-based care—we invite you to read our new Arbital Health 2025 Summit Insight Report. 
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About Arbital Health
Arbital Health provides the critical infrastructure for providers and payers to successfully manage risk-based contracts. With the industry’s leading value-based actuaries and robust AI-powered platform, Arbital Health accelerates contract performance monitoring and decision-making, centralizes fragmented data, and automates contract reconciliation across all major risk models. By reducing complexity and administrative burden, Arbital Health ensures value-based care contracts deliver on their promise of better patient outcomes and sustainable financial performance. Arbital Health is led by a best-in-class team of healthcare actuaries, engineers, and industry veterans, and backed by leading investors Valtruis, Transformation Capital, Shaper Capital, and Healthy Ventures.
Reach out to our team of VBC experts and explore how Arbital's AI-powered platform and best-in-class actuaries can help successfully manage your risk contracts. Schedule a Meeting >
