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.

Within the unpaid group, partnerships can essentially function as a chief-of-staff or glorified account-management role — something a junior person with a growing network and strong hustle can lead. But in the scenario where partnerships mean unlocking new revenue, the role should sit across sales, customer success, corporate development, product, and marketing. If it reports to anyone, it's usually the CEO, president, or chief commercial officer. The ideal candidate can be a former founder (as in Brendan's case), a marketer moving deeper into sales, or a product manager interested in taking on more of a commercial focus (and vice versa). 

Organizations take partnerships seriously when it's tied to a P&L, has systems for tracking leads, and carries its own revenue goals. Done well, it's also a potential on-ramp for M&A — both to get acquired and to acquire a partner.

Historically, partnership activity has been more concentrated in B2B, but that's shifting. For consumer companies, the key driver is finding an alternative to patient acquisition via Meta and social media ads. Another example comes from Folx, which serves LGBTQI+ patients. It announced a partnership with the nonprofit Crisis Text Line to refer patients who need text-based mental health support. Companies in care delivery are acknowledging that they can't do everything themselves — and rather than hold that optionality open for the future, partnerships offer an immediate way to serve patients more holistically while generating new referrals.

On the B2B side, partnership strategies are unlocking revenue faster than traditional methods alone. "In the VC-backed AI era, speed to $100M ARR is more paramount than ever before," said Raihan Faroqui, head of partnerships at Confido Health. "You can't get there in three to four years by deploying traditional methods alone — one-to-one outbound sales, paid marketing, driving inbound, conferences, events, and so on. That's why you are seeing a huge emphasis on channel partnership hires hoping to unlock co-selling, reseller, white label, and upsell arrangements with EHRs, scribes, revenue cycle companies, practice management consultants, or any other AI/SaaS vendor that shares the same ideal customer profile."

That's also why this role is so tricky to hire for — and yet, as we mentioned, increasingly in demand.

Easier said than done

Converting partnerships into a repeatable, reliable revenue source is harder than it looks. It often involves lengthy redline negotiations, tricky integrations (both technical and organizational), and ROI that has to be genuinely shared on both sides — or the partnership will fizzle despite good intentions.

But when partnerships actually work, they're a significant unlock for growth without the cost of inflated patient acquisition budgets or M&A. Some partnerships are extremely lightweight to set up: Charlie Health, for instance, has made it easy for providers to refer patients to its virtual IOP. Others involve deep integration work that can take months, particularly those involving health systems or large enterprise buyers. Oura, the consumer wearable, has found success by routing users who need clinical care to an expanding array of telemedicine partners.