Brandon Sullivan, the co-author of this piece, is the Head of Partnerships and Growth at Candid Health
There's a massive trend to hire a head of partnerships right now. Take the behavioral health company Headspace, which just increased its partnerships team by 40%, adding two full-time roles to bring its global headcount to seven. That effort has helped it execute partnerships with companies like LinkedIn, Roblox, Meta, and Starbucks, and expand into new sectors like biopharma.
Its CEO, Tom Pickett, told us the goal is twofold: build the brand and increase revenue.
At Headspace, the partnerships team reports directly to the President, alongside Direct-to-Consumer, Employer, and Health Plan sales. It’s essential to the organization’s future growth.
Partnerships have always shown enormous potential in healthcare, but have historically been very challenging to execute in practice. All that is starting to change. There's a fundamental shift occurring in the market, accelerated by AI, where companies are finding big boosts from partnerships without the same operational headaches. Headspace VP of Strategic Partnerships Terence Lim told us that there's not as much friction these days from "clunky integrations or handoffs."
To explore more deeply what actually works, I teamed up with Candid Health's Brendan Sullivan — himself a Head of Partnerships — to write this playbook. Sustainable growth is the name of the game in this market, which is why this role is more important than ever.
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It's all about relationships
A successful partnership strategy in healthcare matters for a few distinct reasons. They allow companies like Headspace to make headway in adjacent industries — entertainment, wellness, biopharma — but there are also significant opportunities to partner across segments within healthcare itself. The industry has a very large total addressable market on paper, but each individual segment is smaller than you might think. Traditional enterprise marketing tactics don't open doors here; it's all about building trust within a network.
The word "partnerships" covers a lot of ground.
In health tech, we see two major types:
Revenue-based partnerships that involve payment of some kind (PMPM, marketing fees, licensing, revenue share)
Brand and Awareness-based Partnerships that are unpaid (mutual referrals, co-marketing, branding)
Companies can pick one lane, the other, or both.