Healthcare Huddle 5.0: 2025 in Review + What’s Next in 2026

Every year, I write an annual update on Healthcare Huddle and where I plan to take it next. If you’re curious, you can read the prior versions here: 2023 report and 2024 report.

In 2025, I set four goals for Healthcare Huddle. Here’s how they shook out.

Double down on content quality: I published deeper work and more of it: 12 Huddle #Trend reports, 50+ Inefficiency Insights analyses, and 50+ Sunday Huddles. I also launched The Middlemen, a newsletter dissecting the intermediaries who shape care and incentives. I published 7 Middlemen reports this year. Across everything, about 1.7 million emails were delivered to the Huddle audience. If you want the top articles across each series, you can find them here.
Nurture the Huddle community: With help from Angela, we moved the community to Slack and started building something more useful than a comments section: a place where health professionals can network, share ideas, and make sense of what’s happening in healthcare.
Expand Huddle University: I launched two courses this year and tested different formats: Healthcare 101 and AI and healthcare utilization. Courses are time-intensive, but I keep coming back to the same reason I like making them: I learn by building, and you learn by taking them.

Healthcare Huddle 5.0

So where does Healthcare Huddle go in 2026?

Grow the Huddle community: If AI automates more of our work, community becomes the differentiator. We still need human-to-human connection, signal over noise, and a place to compare notes. In 2026, expect more intentional community building and more in-person events and meetups.
Launch Huddle+ for employers and group plans: I think one of the most valuable parts of Healthcare Huddle is Huddle+. Most of my time now goes into Inefficiency Insights, Huddle Trends, The Middlemen, and courses. Up to now, I’ve primarily marketed Huddle+ to individuals. But there’s a real employer use case here too: keeping teams consistently informed with physician-driven analysis of healthcare business, policy, and the realities of care delivery. In 2026, I’m launching employer and group plans. If you want to take a look, you can do that here.
Keep building Huddle University (with constraints). I’m aiming for at least two courses in 2026. I’ll be starting fellowship in the second half of the year, so I’m planning to ship both before then. Reminder: courses are included with Huddle+.
Build a new newsletter vertical. I’m building another newsletter using the Healthcare Huddle recipe and applying it to a new niche. I’m planning a soft launch in July, with a full launch in January 2027.
Experiment with whitepapers. Back to the 2025 goal: depth. In 2026, I’m going to test more whitepapers. The point is simple: teach something real about how this system works.
One ask: what do you want more of from Healthcare Huddle next year?