We turn policy into results.
The Health Co-Lab exists to close the gap between what a healthcare policy says and what a provider, plan, or agency can actually operate, bill, and measure.
Get in touchWho we are
The Health Co-Lab is a healthcare consulting and technology firm and a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business. We work at the intersection of Medicaid policy, provider operations, and software, and our team has spent careers inside state Medicaid agencies, managed care plans, safety-net providers, and the technology that connects them. That mix is deliberate. Most of the problems our clients bring us sit in the seams between policy, operations, and systems, and solving them requires people who can read a State Plan Amendment, redesign a clinical workflow, and specify an 837 claim file in the same meeting.
We do not build PowerPoints and walk away. When a Medicaid office needs to implement a new federal requirement, when a provider needs to get paid for a service it has never billed before, or when a plan needs to remove friction from its provider network, we understand the business first and then build what is needed to run it: a program design, an application, a data layer, an evaluation, or a rules engine that turns policy language into auditable operations.
What we do
Our work falls into four areas, and most engagements touch more than one.
Medicaid policy and program implementation
We help state Medicaid agencies, departments of social services, and county governments translate federal and state policy into operating programs. That includes waiver design and management, managed care oversight and External Quality Review, benefit rollout and provider manual development, and implementation support for new federal requirements such as the H.R. 1 work and community engagement rules. We are currently supporting CalHHS and the California Department of Social Services on one of the first state efforts in the country to address those requirements across both Medicaid and SNAP in a single coordinated approach.
Provider revenue and revenue cycle operations
We help providers of every size get paid correctly and completely. For a nationwide behavioral health network with 115 payer contracts, that meant an end-to-end revenue cycle assessment that surfaced roughly $5 million in denied claims and produced a payer mapping tool the billing team still uses every day. For a multi-site community health center, it meant enterprise financial modeling that revealed site margins ranging from -30% to +17% and quantified the revenue at risk from federal Medicaid changes. For community-based organizations entering CalAIM, it means taking them from no Medicaid billing capability to clean, compliant claims.
Technology that runs the program
We build software when the market does not offer what our clients need. LastMile RCM, our claims and revenue cycle platform, is in production today as the central billing operation for a community care Hub in California's Central Valley, as the claiming engine for a peer-led reentry services organization, and as the first system ever to take data out of a county-run CalSAWS eligibility system and generate a claim that can be submitted to a Medi-Cal managed care plan. Alongside LastMile, we design and build purpose-built applications, including a custom Transitional Rent management platform for a housing provider and the beneficiary-facing compliance calculator, learning management system, and credential program finder that support California's H.R. 1 pilot. We also assess, procure, implement, and integrate commercial EMR and case management systems when that is the right answer.
Analytics, evaluation, and model of care design
We work with large datasets to find patterns that change decisions: which sites are profitable and why, where a plan's provider network is creating friction, whether a program is producing the outcomes it was funded for. That work includes CMS waiver evaluations, focused quality studies, financial and policy impact modeling, and the design and monitoring of health-related social needs programs, Community Health Worker models, and Enhanced Care Management services.
How we work
Every engagement starts with understanding your business before we propose anything. We validate the idea against the policy, the data, and the people who will have to operate it. Then we craft the solution, implement and deploy it with your staff, and measure what changed so the next improvement is grounded in evidence rather than opinion.
We use rules, not artificial intelligence, in the work we deliver. Turning policy into operations is a matter of correctly coded rule sets, documented procedures, and technology that applies them the same way every time, so that outcomes are replicable and auditable. We use AI to build faster, but we never put it between us and you, and we never expose your data to it.
A Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business
The Health Co-Lab is founded on dedication, resilience, and excellence, and is proudly owned and controlled by a service-disabled veteran. Public sector clients that partner with us gain a firm that has delivered for state agencies, counties, health plans, and providers, while also meeting SDVOSB procurement goals and supporting veterans in business.
Let's talk.
Tell us the policy you need to turn into a program, the service you need to get paid for, or the system that is not working. We will tell you what we would build.
Get in touch