Advisory

Growth strategy for companies competing in the health plan market.

Upward Growth is a health plan market advisory firm founded by Ryan Peterson. We work with four types of organizations to build go-to-market strategy grounded in how health plans actually buy, operate, and make decisions: health tech vendors, investors, provider organizations, and management consultancies.

The firm’s perspective comes from nearly 15 years of direct experience selling to health plans, including Medicare Advantage plans, national carriers, regional Medicaid MCOs, Blues plans, and commercial health plans. We’ve helped companies at every stage, from early-revenue vendors closing their first plan contracts to established platforms scaling past $200M in ARR, build growth strategies that hold up under real market pressure.

📩 To explore working together: info@upwardgrowth.com

🟦 Connect on LinkedIn: Upward Growth | Ryan Peterson

Health Tech Vendors

You have a product health plans need. We help you build the positioning, sales process, and market entry strategy to reach them.

Whether you are pre-revenue or scaling an existing book, we work at the layer between your product and the plan’s buying cycle. That includes competitive positioning, pricing strategy, sales organization design, health plan buyer mapping, and market entry planning. Whether the challenge is breaking into new plan segments, rebuilding a sales motion that isn’t converting, or preparing a growth strategy for a board or investor audience, we help leadership teams get to the root of what’s slowing growth down and build the commercial path forward.

Investors

You need to understand how a company fits the payor landscape. We provide market diligence, competitive positioning analysis, and buyer-readiness assessments grounded in how health plans actually evaluate vendors.

Before close: we help investors pressure-test the commercial story behind health tech investments in the payor market. That means evaluating pipeline quality, buyer concentration, competitive positioning, pricing sustainability, and whether the growth trajectory holds up under the scrutiny of an investment committee. We help investors get past the deck and understand whether a company’s payor market traction is real, repeatable, and defensible.

After close: we work with portfolio company leadership on the strategic and commercial adjustments that turn a good investment thesis into actual growth. That includes go-to-market execution, sales organization design, competitive messaging, and market expansion planning for health plan segments including Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and commercial lines of business.

Provider Organizations

You are building solutions that serve health plans. We help you understand the payor’s perspective on your offering: what they are looking for, how they evaluate it, and how to frame your value in language that resonates with their priorities.

Provider-led solutions face a particular challenge selling into the payor market. The operational reality, financial incentives, and buying behavior of health plans differ sharply from how providers typically think about clinical and operational value. We help provider organizations close that gap, translating clinical capability into payor-ready positioning, understanding how plans evaluate provider partnerships, and building commercial strategy that meets plans where they actually sit.

Management Consultancies

You advise clients who operate in the payor market. We serve as an embedded subject matter resource on health plan operations, buying behavior, and regulatory context so your recommendations carry the depth your clients expect.

That includes health plan buyer dynamics, market sizing and segmentation, competitive landscape analysis, vendor positioning, and commercial due diligence. We embed directly into engagement teams, joining working sessions and client calls as a resource your team can lean on throughout the project. When your team needs someone who has actually sold into the health plan market, negotiated contracts with plans, and understands how purchasing decisions get made inside health plan organizations, that is where we come in.

About Ryan Peterson, Principal & Founder

Ryan Peterson is the founder and principal of Upward Growth. He has spent nearly 15 years selling to health plans, holding senior leadership roles in growth and sales at companies including Advantmed, Reveleer, NantHealth, and Quantum Health. Across those roles, he has led sales organizations, built go-to-market strategies, negotiated enterprise contracts with health plans, and helped companies scale from early revenue through nine-figure ARR, across both software and services.

Ryan also publishes Upward Growth, a weekly newsletter covering payor market trends, health tech go-to-market strategy, and CMS regulatory developments. The newsletter reaches more than 4,500 subscribers, including health tech CEOs, CROs, VPs of Sales, and PE/VC investors, and has become one of the most widely read independent publications focused on health tech growth strategy in the payor market.