Steve Valdiserri spent a decade helping build one of the country’s most closely watched primary care companies from the ground up. Now, operating out of Traverse City, Michigan, he is turning the same operational instincts toward a new set of problems in healthcare finance and value-based strategy.
Before the Framework, There Was the Problem
Healthcare organizations often talk about transformation. What they talk about less is the infrastructure required to make transformation real: the data pipelines, the payer relationships, the attribution logic that determines which patients belong to which providers and, by extension, which performance numbers get reported and rewarded.
Steve Valdiserri spent a decade at VillageMD focused on exactly that kind of unglamorous, foundational work. He joined the company in 2015, when it was still a nascent operation, and he was among the first ten employees to help build its internal structure. Over the years that followed, he moved through a series of expanding roles, eventually reaching VP of Patient Engagement and Retention, developing a specialized understanding of value-based care operations that would define the next chapter of his career.
That kind of tenure at a single organization is unusual in an industry that moves fast and rewards mobility. It also produced something that cannot be replicated by reading about healthcare transformation from the outside: a floor-level understanding of how the systems actually work, where they break down, and what it takes to move them forward.
The Attribution Problem Nobody Talks About
Ask Valdiserri what keeps value-based care organizations from performing at their potential, and the answer comes quickly: attribution.
Attribution is the process by which payers assign patients to specific providers for the purposes of measuring and rewarding quality and cost performance. It is, in his framing, the front door to everything that follows. If a patient is not attributed correctly, none of the downstream work on care management, quality improvement, or cost reduction produces the financial return it should.
The problem is that attribution is also one of the least celebrated disciplines in value-based care operations. It is meticulous, payer-specific, and demands a close working relationship with the same insurance companies that providers often find difficult to engage. Valdiserri has described the challenge plainly: even when working at an organization large enough to command payer attention, the effort required to maintain productive engagement was considerable. For smaller organizations, the challenge is often insurmountable.
His experience across Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and commercial plans gave him a perspective on attribution that few operators develop. It also shaped how he thinks about where organizations typically go wrong: they invest in care management strategies, build quality programs, and pursue operational improvements, all without first ensuring the patients they are managing are actually counting toward the contracts that govern their performance.
Building What Was Missing
In mid-2024, Valdiserri stepped away from the structure of a large organization and into independent consulting. The work continued in the same domain, advising healthcare organizations on value-based care strategy, attribution, and operational performance, but on his own terms.
By mid-2025, that consulting work had formalized into Avanti Strategy Group, a healthcare strategy and AI innovation firm. The name reflects something personal. Avanti is an Italian word that translates roughly as “always forward” or “onward,” a reference to Valdiserri’s Italian heritage and a signal of the firm’s orientation: past the roadblocks, toward the value that organizations are leaving unrealized.
The firm’s work is defined less by a specific service offering and more by a willingness to engage with the problems that healthcare organizations avoid because they are complicated, data-intensive, or require the kind of patient, persistent engagement with payers that most operators find exhausting. Avanti describes its approach as connecting organizations to solutions and helping them realize the financial value of acting on what they already know.
Parallel Tracks in Healthcare Finance
The same period that produced Avanti Strategy Group also brought Valdiserri into two other organizations working on adjacent problems. At Tally, a healthcare AI and automation company, he serves as SVP of Operations, building the operational infrastructure for a platform that targets the back-end of healthcare finance: revenue cycle management, financial reporting, and the manual processes that consume time in accounting and operations teams across multi-site healthcare organizations.
At Accurio, the sister company to Tally, they deploy human revenue cycle management services, helping multi-site organizations get a hold and understanding of their revenue. He holds the same title, applying his operations experience to the challenge of making revenue cycle make sense and flow efficiently. These companies together provide premium human-led RCM services (Accurio) while building automated tools, workflows, and efficiencies in an industry where complexity and regulation demand both technological capability and human judgment.
The concurrent roles reflect a view that automation in healthcare finance and revenue cylce is not a single problem but an interconnected one. Technology can eliminate manual steps and surface better data. But without people who understand the clinical and regulatory context in which that data lives, the tools are unlikely to deliver on their potential.
The Deeper Argument
Valdiserri has also built a growing presence on LinkedIn, where he writes about value-based care strategy, attribution, payer collaboration, and the challenge of making healthcare operations work in practice rather than on paper. The posts are direct and specific, reflecting the same operational orientation that runs through his professional work.
One theme that appears consistently is the problem of metrics. Healthcare organizations measure a great deal, he argues, and that volume of measurement can obscure rather than illuminate the actual financial health of a business. His framework is deliberately reductive: identify the two or three true north metrics that tell the real story, and resist the pull of detailed reporting that creates noise without producing better decisions.
It is the kind of perspective that comes from sitting inside a large organization long enough to watch what actually drives performance versus what gets reported at leadership meetings. The argument is not that data is unimportant. It is that clarity matters more than comprehensiveness, and that the organizations most likely to improve are the ones that can distinguish between the two.
Steve Valdiserri and What Comes Next
Valdiserri also serves as an advisor at numerous healthcare related organizations. VivaScore, a health intelligence platform that uses AI and biometric data to produce unified health scores for employers, payers, and providers. Clear Harbor Advisors builds data and analytics solutions that help ACOs transition from legacy CMS data feeds to real-time, API-driven Medicare claims intelligence. Along with a few other companies in the healthcare space. These advisory roles add another thread to a portfolio that spans advisory, operational leadership, and firm building simultaneously.
He holds a certificate in AI in Health Care: From Strategies to Implementation from Harvard Medical School’s professional education division, completed in October 2025. The credential reflects a broader interest in how AI tools can be evaluated and responsibly applied in healthcare, not just adopted because the technology is available.
Valdiserri is a HYROX competitor, a fitness discipline that combines running with functional exercise stations, and has spoken publicly about the role of discipline, habits, and physical training in his personal life. He is based in Traverse City, Michigan, a small city on the shores of Lake Michigan that he has described as a place where the pace of water and landscape offers a contrast to the pace of operational work.
He graduated from DePauw University in 2012 with a degree in economics, where he was a four-year varsity football letterman, senior captain, and member of the University Presidential Captain’s Council. He won two state football championships in high school at Bishop Chatard in Indianapolis. Neither the discipline required by competitive athletics nor the orientation toward structure and execution it produces seems incidental to the career that followed.
The problems Valdiserri has spent his career working on are not the ones that generate headlines. Attribution does not trend. Revenue cycle management does not produce viral content. But in an industry where the distance between strategy and financial performance is often explained by exactly these unglamorous operational factors, the work itself carries weight. His argument, sustained across multiple roles and organizations, is that the organizations willing to address the foundational problems first are the ones that actually move forward.
