Healthcare Tech Buying Committees Are Driven by Federal- and State-Level Programs. Your Sales Team Should Be Too.

RHT. AHEAD. LEAD. TEAM. REACH. 

The latest additions to healthcare’s alphabet soup instantly perk buying committee ears…and there’s a good chance they mean next to nothing to your sales team. 

That’s a sales playbook gap that needs to close for multiple reasons. 

Not only do these value-based care (VBC) programs almost all lean into technology, they also need the influence of vendors who understand the potential of their solutions at a level that provider-level healthcare leaders do not. This means that state- and program-level thinking are where the buying committee attention and spend are shifting—and your sales team needs to catch up to keep up. 

A range of programs are active for healthcare tech vendors

The horizon for CMS programs runs into the 2030s, and multiple programs are already in play. 

• TEAM goes active January 2026.
• ASM and ACCESS launch July 2026.
• RHT applications are in motion in states across the nation. 
• IOTA is already live. 

For tech vendors, this means a need to refresh your sales playbook. For example, instead of wasting time on a health system CFO (who might have reduced buying influence and not even be aware yet), you approach the state health department running the program. 

These programs are adding in state-level specificity, and in many cases shifting tech purchasing decisions out of the hands of hospital and health system leaders and into state-level offices and grant departments. 

This is an opening for your reps. By understanding how your solutions align with these programs, you have a ready-made business case plus often something much more powerful—a path to funding investment in your solution. 

Once you understand how your solutions map to these programs, your reps can step in with trigger words and concepts that perk the ears of every role on the buying committee—faster than any feature, functionality, or ROI stat. 

A new normal for healthcare tech buying has emerged

Looking at patterns across current and near-term programs, this is the future for government programs across the United States.  We’re already watching this play out with Rural Health Transformation and its incredible level of state-level variability, and new programs are falling in line. 

Medicaid-funded home and community-based services (HCBS) is following a similar pattern, with healthcare leaders noticing the state-level complexity early. 

“The level of disruption for providers will be driven almost entirely by how states choose to implement it.”

– Bill Hanna, practice director at ATI Advisory and a former state Medicaid director. 

Overall, CMS is expanding the number of models running parallel, including Long-term Enhanced ACO Design (LEAD), Making Care Primary (MCP), and now the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHT). This dynamic multiplies the compliance and strategic decision-making burden on the providers you’re selling to. 

Why early movers win the VBC tech race

On its face, this looks like a burden for vendors, but it’s actually an opportunity—a chance to own how your category is leveraged in these programs…and even shape the programs themselves. This happens primarily at two levels.

Engagement

Providers across the country are attending RHT town halls and engaging in comment periods to shape how the program is rolled out in various states. Vendors can send sales, clinical SMEs and even policy specialists to town halls, having marketing produce content for comment periods in grants, LOIs, and general distribution. 

Partnership

This opportunity isn’t as common (for now), but vendors are being given increasing influence even at the grant application level. For example, Nevada allows vendors to apply for RHT grants when in partnership with a provider.

But beyond this, these programs are new to providers too. They don’t fully understand the breadth of possibilities in these programs…but you do. Vendors should already be reaching out to current clients and prospects as consultative guides in how they engage their chosen and local programs. 

Implementing a program-first sales playbook

The primary challenge in taking advantage of this opportunity is figuring out where to start. There are a lot of programs out there in play for hospitals and health systems (here’s an expanded list) and relevance and context are critical. 

Here’s what I recommend for tech vendors making this shift in 2026-2027. 

• Pick your lens: Do you want to focus at the state level or laser focus on a few programs your solutions align with? This framing will make a significant difference in sales and even marketing content. 
• Define sales enablement needs: Can sales explain your RHT alignment? Do they understand which roles should receive which materials? Do they have the narratives they need? Are they able to ask the right questions of the right people? 
• Align content priorities: Whatever angle you choose, your content presence should reflect that. You don’t need to go on a content blitz, but you do need to own your alignment with a program—creating content that’s genuinely useful for your buyers and that goes beyond generic thought leadership. This approach to content (Outcomes-Based Content Marketing) is also how you rank for AI-enabled search. 
• Take action: Get your teams moving on a new playbook with the proper support , both internally and externally. This is an additional layer, and one that your team might not be ready for, so outsourcing and consulting can be accelerants, getting you moving quickly on time-restricted programs. 

The easiest point of entry is an exercise to determine which programs are most relevant to your solution and how they play out in a specific state. This offer was built for exactly that.

Recommended Resources

VBC Programs Impacting Hospitals & Health System Decision-Making in 2026

5 Strategic Reasons Your Healthcare Tech Company Needs an RHT Plan Yesterday

About the Author

Megan Williams is an enterprise healthcare technology content strategist, founder of LocutusHealth, and originator of the Outcomes-Based Content Marketing (OBCM) Framework. She has 20 years of experience helping health tech vendors turn content into a strategic revenue driver for the healthcare buying committee — clinical, financial, IT, and administrative decision-makers.

Megan has been closely tracking the Rural Health Transformation Program since its inception, researching state-by-state requirements and helping vendors evaluate and act on the opportunity. She publishes findings in the How Healthcare Buys Tech newsletter.

Connect with Megan: LinkedIn

Framework: Outcomes-Based Content Marketing (OBCM)

Focus Areas: Healthcare IT, Enterprise Health Tech, Rural Health Transformation, Content Strategy ContentTeam Member: HP/Forbes, Verizon, Samsung Healthcare