Shift Forward Health is your partner for operationalizing consumer-first care. We are a healthcare consumer advisory firm with an extensive content library and vibrant virtual community for changemakers — the leaders who seek to make healthcare easier for everyday people.
Wherever your organization is on its consumer journey, we serve as valuable partners to help you develop consumer-centric products, services, and experiences. Some are looking to establish a consumer innovation function; others need help improving a strategy that already exists.
Since 2020, we have been building the largest library of content about consumer strategy and innovation to help educate practitioners and arm them with consumer-first tools and mindsets.
In 2021, we founded the Consumer-First Health Group, the first and only networking group and think tank for professionals interested in operationalizing healthcare consumer transformation at all levels.
In 2023, we launched our advisory service to provide the ongoing implementation guidance that organizations need to create truly consumer-centered products, services, and experiences.
Services
- Establishing a consumer innovation/consumer insights function from scratch
- Partnership strategies for retail and digital health
- Developing and marketing hospital-at-home, virtual health, direct primary care, and other consumer-first products and services
- Marketing comparison against traditional and nontraditional entrants
- Consumer experience benchmarking
- Market awareness
- Trend scanning and research
- Tech stack architecture
- Online scheduling and identity management solutions
Principal
Jared Johnson
Jared is a consumer strategy consultant on a mission to make healthcare easier for everyday people. He has produced hundreds of podcast episodes and thousands of articles, social media posts, and pages of web content as a senior digital strategist for some of the top healthcare and medtech brands in the country, including St. Jude Medical, Pfizer, W. L. Gore, and Phoenix Children’s Hospital.
Jared is a rapping keynote speaker, host of the long-running Healthcare Rap Podcast, founder of the Consumer-First Health Group, winner of the Medigy HITMC 2021 Marketer of the Year Award, and author of two books, Marketing Forward and Connect the Docs.
When he isn’t challenging the status quo, he can be found running obstacle course races or hiking with his wife and their four children.
Partners
Linda MacCracken
Linda helps health delivery leaders and teams enhance top and bottom line revenue, with investment cases while enhancing customer targeted engagement and improve ROI. She works with payers, providers, and emerging firms in business and academic settings to reinvent customer-centric capabilities using marketing expertise to unlock value for business and customers.
Linda’s mission is to help health delivery teams find and execute on their market advantage by leveraging her core competencies in marketing, strategy, customer experience, customer engagement and retention, digital integration, go-to-market strategy, channel optimization, analytics, and team leadership. She creates and facilitates leadership and team building workshops to understand customer insights in segments, personas, journey maps, and tactical leverage segmentation to meet business targets. She also facilitates senior executive meetings to promote effective customer decision making and implementation related to strategic growth and business initiatives.
Linda is fortunate to serve on the faculty of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she teaches and advises physician leaders at the forefront of health innovation and delivery in marketing, and she was recognized by SHSMD’s annual Leadership Excellence award for innovation and professional contributions.
Paul Schrimpf
Rated as a Top 50 healthcare consultant by the Consulting Report, Paul has worked with the majority of healthcare companies in the Fortune 500, working with leaders across every subsector and understanding the misaligned incentives that exist (and why). He has a keen sense of the future of healthcare and prides himself in making things tangible and real. You won’t find him just talking about the theories and philosophy of things — such as value-based care — you’ll find him putting it to work for companies in driving better clinical and economic outcomes for those organizations.
Paul loves healthcare because of the never-ending complexities and problems to solve. He appreciates that there are a lot of things that make healthcare complex, and believes much of that is self-imposed. His podcast, Microdosing, embodies his deep healthcare expertise, pragmatic style, and tangible approaches to making progress.
Paul played semiprofessional rugby into his thirties, and you’ll likely catch him on the weekends cheering on the Chicago Hounds or watching an international match.
Ben Tingey
Ben is an experienced innovation and design consultant with a passion for understanding the causal mechanisms underlying consumer behavior. That passion is matched with a drive to build or revamp business models that consistently deliver upon the consumer’s desired progress.
Through years of hands-on experience in healthcare delivery innovation, corporate strategy, consumer research, and human-centered design, Ben has successfully delivered insights and solutions for employers and consulting clients. With formal training in design thinking, design sprints, Jobs to Be Done consumer strategy, and disruptive innovation theory, Ben has further forged those skills as a corporate innovation leader at one of the largest health systems in the country. His areas of expertise include customer discovery and ethnography research, facilitating design workshops, design prototyping and testing, business model innovation, and innovation leadership training and coaching.
For six years Ben hosted the A Sherpa’s Guide to Innovation podcast, which featured informative interviews with leading innovators and academics on applied innovation tools and theories. His prior industry experience includes an early-stage startup company and a healthcare lobbying firm.