Investment evaluation
$15M–$60M initiative portfolios. Go / no-go modeling. Capital-prioritization frameworks leaders still use after the meeting ends.
Twin Cities · Healthcare strategy & growth
I help healthcare organizations decide what to build, buy, or partner for — then stay until the work is live.
Thirteen years at UnitedHealthcare and Optum Advisory. I evaluate investments, build the financial case, and turn a growth thesis into a capability clients will fund and use — across pharmacy, payer, and digital health.
Approach
Who, what, and how.
Who. A servant leader. The job is to make the people around the work better than they would be alone.
What. Healthcare people can actually use — members, clients, and the operators in between. Clarity and follow-through beat a polished deck.
How. Enable leaders to grow past the sum of their parts. Connect the expertise, pressure-test the bet, and keep the work moving after the meeting.
My father had stomach cancer. That is context, not the job description.
Philosophy
The work added up to a Client Partner seat. I treated the title literally.
I was not trying to hit a sales number. I was trying to sit on the client’s side of the table, argue for what would help their business, and pull in the people inside Optum who could actually do the work.
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Do not dump your process on the client.
If we are disorganized, they end up chasing our teams. A partner keeps the moving pieces together so the client can run their business instead of running ours.
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Talk in a way they can use.
Clients do not need another long explanation of how we work. They need a clear recommendation their own leaders can say yes or no to.
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Bring the right people, do not try to be all of them.
The useful part of the job was knowing who to call — pharmacy, actuarial, analytics, operations — and putting that person in the room with the client.
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Do not disappear after they say yes.
If the idea only looks good in a meeting and then stalls when it has to go live, that was not a partnership. Stay with it until it is working, or until you can say honestly that it will not.
Skills
How I actually spend my time.
Find the opportunity. Model whether it is real. Align the counterparties. Stay with it until it runs.
Commercialization
Opportunity screens, commercial theses, and offering design across mail, retail pharmacy, and PBM (payer) solutions — on both the delivery and client sides.
Diligence leadership
Finance, actuarial, pharmacy operations, product, analytics, and technology in one workstream until the recommendation can survive contact with operations.
Client partnership
Own the growth agenda for priority relationships. Source work, convert it, manage expectations, and judge whether an account will adopt, renew, and expand.
Executive narrative
Board- and sponsor-ready materials that turn messy pharmacy and payer mechanics into a decision, not a deck that needs another deck.
Health-tech fluency
PBM and specialty pharmacy, Medicare and Medicaid, payer partnerships, digital health, and AI-enabled analytics that have to make inconsistent data usable.
Experience
Thirteen years inside UnitedHealth Group.
UnitedHealthcare and Optum Advisory, 2013–present. Consulting, growth, and investment evaluation across Optum Rx, Optum, and UnitedHealthcare.
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2022 – 2026
Optum Rx Client Partner · Business Development & Strategy Lead
Owned the growth agenda for priority Optum Rx client relationships. Built commercialization models and executive business cases. Led cross-functional diligence before recommending scale. Shaped an AI-enabled analytics offering that turned operational data into decision support.
Contributed to 33% client-book growth in year one, incremental annual growth, and 60% year-over-year growth in 2026.
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2020 – 2022
Associate Director · Value Realization Program Lead
Led the enterprise value-realization portfolio inside the Optum Rx Strategy Management Office. Supported investment decisions across $15M–$60M strategic initiatives in pharmacy, analytics, and operational transformation. Stood up the comparison process leaders used to decide what got funded.
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2018 – 2019
Senior Consultant · UHG Enterprise Marketing Operations
Identified an estimated $50M in enterprise digital-conversion savings through print-taxonomy analysis. Packaged the findings as an investment case and operating playbook, including the Nationwide B2B Experience Center Playbook.
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2017 – 2018
Project Lead · Enterprise Risk Management Process Build
Scoped, priced, sold, and delivered a ground-up ERM documentation program — mapping stress-testing methodologies and catastrophic-loss scenarios into governance leadership could actually use. Owned the cycle from thesis to close.
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2016 – 2017
Consultant · Consumer-Facing Digital Product Owner
Owned the product roadmap for MedicareMadeClear.com — requirements, vendor delivery, testing, and experience upgrades. Used engagement data to prioritize the backlog.
+22% year-over-year email engagement.
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2015 – 2016
Senior Analyst · Revenue Reconciliation Process Owner
Owned master-data management against $12B in monthly client-specific product revenue across Optum businesses. Automated reconciliation and recovered 20+ hours per month of analyst time. Partnered with developers and business leads on the MDM ecosystem — matching disparate client records, automating survivor records, and working primary keys.
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2013 – 2014
Analyst · Insurance Retail & Process Optimization
Supported structured prioritization of 80+ HealthNet medical-management recommendations by cost and impact. Improved retail insurance intake through documentation capture and streamlined pre-registration.
Education
Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing & Finance
Augsburg University, 2009–2013. Tutor in finance, economics, marketing, and MIS. Augsburg Stewards philanthropy leader. Student-athlete.
Tools I live in
Excel (advanced modeling and automation) · PowerPoint (executive and board narratives) · Power BI, Tableau, Domo · Salesforce · Teams / Copilot
Contact
If you need someone who can pressure-test a bet and still own the account after it launches, I would like to talk.
I live in the Twin Cities. I am looking at strategy, growth, client-partner, and program seats across pharmacy, payer, provider, and patient-experience work. Oncology and survivorship are a through-line of interest. They are not a filter that rules the rest of the work out.
Email jklochner@gmail.com
Phone 320.761.2925
Location Twin Cities, Minnesota
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/justin-lochner