Built by an operator, not a data vendor.

Before Altitude Intelligence, I led finance and development for four freestanding surgery centers across central and eastern Massachusetts — 23 operating rooms, three health system partners, a group of physician investors. I was the finance lead on the deal negotiation, the financing, the real estate, and the payer contracting for each one.

Before that, I led strategic finance and development for the largest independent regional health system in Massachusetts. We doubled inpatient capacity. Built an off-campus hospital-based surgery center. Acquired physician practices. I served as project controller for a $200 million IT refresh and EHR implementation, and I worked directly on debtholder relations that successfully raised growth capital.

The hardest part of any of this was never the deal itself. It was walking into negotiations without the one piece of information that would have changed the conversation: what peer facilities actually got paid for the same procedures.

That data existed. CMS's Transparency in Coverage rule made payers publish it in machine-readable form starting in 2022. But it's buried in terabytes of files — files so large and heterogeneous that no provider contracting team has the engineering capacity to open them. Self-serve platforms in the space will sell you access to the data. They won't sit down and turn it into a negotiation strategy for a 170-bed community hospital or a four OR ambulatory surgery center.

So I built the pipeline myself. First for consulting engagements — small and regional — where I'd been asked to run numbers for clients. Then at scale, processing Cigna's national commercial files end-to-end, with UnitedHealthcare next, and a multi-payer architecture underneath.

Altitude Intelligence is the productization of that work. It's services-led because the facilities this is built for — community hospitals, ASCs, specialty centers — don't need another dashboard they won't use. They need a partner who'll do the analysis and walk into the room with them.

— Andy Wilkinson