As a Senior Strategic Advisor, Ray provides consultation to NPHI and its members, offering guidance on strategy, internal and external messaging, policy analysis, and stakeholder outreach. His expertise helps shape NPHI’s advocacy efforts and strategic direction, ensuring that member organizations remain at the forefront of healthcare delivery transformation.
Beyond NPHI, Ray is Managing Partner at Healthsperien, LLC, bringing decades of leadership in health care public policy, legislative and regulatory strategy, grassroots advocacy, and strategic communications. He leads Healthsperien’s team of policy professionals in the development of comprehensive policy analysis, advocacy strategies, and legislative solutions, guiding clients through complex policy landscapes to address critical health care delivery and payment challenges.
Ray has developed expertise in addressing key issues supporting physicians and providers, expanding care in the home (including home-based primary care and hospital-at-home models), improving mental and behavioral health systems, and advancing value-based care. This work includes developing innovative policy solutions, crafting stakeholder engagement and advocacy strategies, and guiding clients in designing, implementing, and refining alternative payment models.
Throughout his career, Ray has led and actively participated in numerous multi-stakeholder coalitions dedicated to improving health care delivery and financing systems. His expertise in this area spans policy, business strategy, and political issues related to delivery system reform and stakeholder engagement. By fostering collaboration among patients, providers, educators, payers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, Ray helps clients achieve transformative and wide-ranging objectives across the care and management spectrum.
Before joining Healthsperien, Ray served as Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the American Osteopathic Association (AOA), where he led federal and state government relations, advocacy, and political operations for nearly 130,000 osteopathic physicians and medical students. His leadership shaped the AOA’s positions on Medicare physician payment, medical liability reform, graduate medical education, and innovative payment model design under public and private systems. Ray also held leadership roles in government relations at Merck Pharmaceuticals, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, and the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians, and provided strategic counsel to healthcare clients as Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Seven Twenty Strategies. Ray began his career as a policy advisor in the Health and Life Sciences practice at B&D Consulting. A native of Arizona, he earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Arizona.