Healthcare Strategy & Technology Advisory
Blackfin Advisory advises health systems, investors, and founders on strategy, transactions, and AI-enabled operations — with the rigor of a large firm and the focus of a small one.
Founded by a McKinsey healthcare alum · Advising since 2018
Senior attention only. The person who scopes the work does the work.
Health systems, investors, and founders — strategy, transactions, and AI-enabled operations.
Engagements sized to reach a decision, not to extend a team.
Services
Four practice areas, one standard: recommendations sharp enough to act on, grounded in how healthcare actually works.
Strategy
Service line strategy, market entry, and transformation programs for health systems and academic centers. Where growth should come from, what it costs to get there, and what the organization has to change.
Transactions
Diligence support for investors and corporate acquirers in healthcare and life sciences. Market sizing, competitive structure, and the operational assumptions that determine whether a thesis holds.
Operations
Where AI genuinely changes the economics of a clinical or administrative workflow — and where it doesn't. Assessment first, then a sequenced implementation plan matched to your data reality.
Founders
Hands-on support for healthcare and life-sciences founders: sharpening product-market fit, shaping growth strategy, and preparing the board materials, investor documents, and fundraising narrative that hold up in the room.
Most healthcare strategy doesn't fail in the analysis. It fails in the operating model that has to carry it — capacity, coordination, and data ready to bear weight.
Approach
Every engagement runs the same disciplined arc. No boilerplate frameworks, no forty-slide throat-clearing.
Establish the fact base: market structure, unit economics, clinical and competitive dynamics, and what your data can actually support.
Pressure-test the options, quantify the tradeoffs, and land on a recommendation the organization can commit to.
Translate strategy into a sequenced plan with owners, milestones, and the operating changes required to make it stick.
Engagements
Every engagement is built around a decision someone has to make — and sized to reach it.
Health systems
Service-line and market-entry choices weighed against capacity, capital, and what the organization can actually execute — with a recommendation leadership can defend to a board, not a menu of options.
Investors
Commercial diligence on deal timelines: market structure, competitive dynamics, and the operational assumptions the model quietly depends on — surfaced while there's still time to act on them.
About
Michael Laker — Founder & Managing Director
Michael spent seven years in McKinsey & Company's healthcare practice advising health systems, academic medical centers, and payers — leading integration work on a $4B health system merger, supporting more than $40B in healthcare M&A, and co-developing a reform forecasting model deployed across more than one hundred hospitals.
He founded Blackfin in 2018 to bring that caliber of work to organizations that want senior counsel without the big-firm machinery. Since then he has advised health systems, investors, and more than ten early-stage healthcare companies on strategy, transactions, and AI-enabled operations, with recent work extending into precision oncology.
Contact
We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right firm to help you decide it.
No pitch. A focused first conversation.