What I'm About...

Shelby Chartkoff

You're looking for someone you can trust with the hard stuff — someone who gets your product, your market, and the clinical stakes, and who won't waste your time figuring out what you already know. You want to know if I'm that person.

I've had a wildly non-linear career and life path...and I wouldn't change a thing about how it's shaped my expertise, my skills, my curiosity, and who I am as a person and a professional. Scroll on to learn more.

I am...

A safe container for doing hard things together.

The best way to build something extraordinary is to be real about where you are, clear about your purpose, and committed to the belief that you and your team can close the gap. That's the foundation I build every engagement on.

My principles:

Tell the truth. Then get to work.

I won't sugarcoat what I find — in your data, your product, your value story. But I'll never hand you a hard finding without a path forward. The truth is only useful when it comes with sleeves rolled up.

Learn backwards, lean forwards.

I bring rigor to everything I do — the same methods that could tear something apart. But the posture is always forward: every finding feeds into building something better, not writing a post-mortem that sits on a shelf.

Build it right-sized: not gold-plated, not disposable.

Ruthlessly pragmatic, always. Your stage, your resources, your timeline. "Just enough" looks like keeping momentum without cutting corners that cost you later. The vision stays big; the steps stay real.

Leave it stronger than you found it.

I build capabilities, not dependency. Sharper questions, stronger frameworks, and a higher starting line for the next challenge. That's why my clients keep coming back.

This work is hard, and ego doesn't make it better.

I leave mine at the door and bring warmth, genuine empathy, and open-minded curiosity to everything I do — because that's how people do their bravest thinking.

I am...

A one-woman "tiger team"

I go deep wherever I'm planted — and I play alongside the natives of each discipline while connecting to the others.

Data products & algorithms
I design, calibrate, and validate the data products at the core of health tech — scoring algorithms, risk models, clinical decision layers, buyer-facing analytics. Not just the math: how the data model connects to clinical reality, product experience, and the value story you need to tell. If the data product isn't defensible, nothing downstream works.

Value architecture & ROI
Where does your value equation actually break down? I find the disconnects between what's clinically true, what's operationally real, and what the buyer cares about — then engineer the proof points, ROI models, and sales tools that close the gap. Not inflated claims. Evidence that survives the buyer's own scrutiny.

Product & assessment experience
B2B2C means your product serves the end user, the buyer, and often clinicians simultaneously — and they all need different things from the same experience. I audit and reshape the product experience across those layers: user flows, report architecture, population analytics for buyers, longitudinal tracking for outcomes. I jump as needed between user research, experience design, evidence and literature review, and data-heavy work, all in the service of the most efficient path towards differentiated experience, outcomes, and business results.

Clinical-product bridge
Many health tech teams struggle to keep clinical conversations pragmatic and dialed into product realities — while also catching the clinical implications of product decisions that really should get alignment. I speak clinician fluently and translate in both directions, so your product gets the rigor it needs without the bottlenecks it doesn't. I'm steeped in the clinical evidence, the literature, and the workflow thinking — so I'm a real extension of your clinical leadership team, not just someone who "plays nice with clinicians." I work at the level where clinical design decisions get made, while keeping the product, data, and commercial implications in view.

Positioning & GTM
The best positioning comes from deeply understanding your product, your market, and what your buyers are actually wrestling with — not from a copywriter's imagination. I synthesize competitive landscape, market dynamics, and your real capabilities into a positioning thesis your team internalizes. Then I translate it into white papers, collateral, and enablement tools grounded in what's real.

I am...

A friendly connector for extended impact.

Many well-meaning people have told me, "You could be so much bigger! You could grow a team!" And sure, I've experimented with that. But my clients want me, and my brain, on their problems. And my brain works best when I'm curiosity-driven, focused on the clients, products, and problems that light me up — not hustling to take any work that keeps billable utilization high.

While I bring breadth, depth, and battle-tested systems to my client work, I also know where my own expertise and capacity ends. That's why I thoughtfully and joyfully curate a network of other independent experts who share my values. When work extends outside my wheelhouse, I'm happy to make the right connections.

And if you're an independent consultant or advisor working in a similar space, I'd love to connect. I'm always looking for great people to refer to — and to learn from.

There and back again...

My roots are in community interventions, psychology, social research, and evaluation — how people and systems actually change, and what's needed to turn program and policy aims into real-world results. I found myself drawn to messy problems with human stakes, resource constraints, and a status quo I knew the right mix of insight and action could move.

That impulse led me through a career of deep healthcare data science, analytics leadership on both the payer and provider sides, over 100 projects, and years of consulting across payers, providers, and health tech vendors. It's an unusual combination, and every piece of it shows up in how I work.

I launched Fruition Analytics in 2018. Before that, I'd always been an intrapreneur — the person inside the organization spotting the opportunities, connecting the dots, pushing innovation forward. But in large organizations, I kept hitting the same wall: turnover and reorgs would wipe out the relationships I'd built, and I'd start over — reselling ideas to new stakeholders, working at the readiness pace of the org instead of the pace of the opportunity. All the while, the combination I'd built kept outgrowing every box I put it in.

This work lets me bring it all together — alongside the kind of people who'd rather fix it than fake it.

Domain expertise

Clinical & behavioral health
  • Population health
  • Chronic disease & care management
  • Psychometrics and assessment design
  • Clinical decision support
  • Clinical quality & process improvement
  • Patient/member experience and engagement
  • Behavioral health, women's health, seniors
Statistics, ML, and algorithms
  • Business problem translation
  • Risk stratification & segmentation
  • Predictive modeling & causal inference
  • Optimization models & algorithm design
  • Statistical process control
  • Survey research
  • Geographic analysis
  • Data storytelling & visualization
Healthcare data models
  • Payer: claims, enrollment, provider network, pharmacy...
  • EMR: inpatient, ambulatory, encounters, labs...
  • Codes, ontologies, groupers...
  • Social determinants of health (SDOH)
  • Quality measures (HEDIS, Stars, CAHPS)
  • Cost and utilization analytics
  • Data architecture & engineering for healthcare analytics
Product/Program Design & Evaluation
  • User research
  • User-centered product and program design
  • Real-world evidence
  • Literature synthesis and application
  • Pragmatic evaluation
  • Qualitative research methods
  • Patient journey mapping
Value & commercial
  • Value-based care analytics
  • Value proposition development
  • ROI/value measurement and modeling
  • Data storytelling & visualization
  • Healthcare buyer decision-making
  • Sales enablement
Healthcare ecosystem
  • Payers. Delivery systems. Hospitals. Providers.
  • Commercial, Medicare & Medicaid populations
  • Quality programs and measures
  • Healthcare economics and finance
  • Regulatory concerns

What My Clients Say

"You earned that trust... First, because you bring that level of knowledge about healthcare and data. It created that rapport right away... Second, because of your sincerity. You're honest and non-biased. When you tell me something, I know it's true, and you can back it up with your work."

— Product Leader

"You brought clarity and direction, and that was a huge relief. There's so much just coming at us every day. You gave us the framework, and the actionable recommendations we needed to help us filter and prioritize what's most important."

— Innovation Manager

"What I appreciate most about Shelby is her ability to bridge the gap between the technical and the business. She can dive deep into the data science and analytics, but also communicate the insights in a way that is clear and actionable for non-technical stakeholders."

— Product Leader

Should we connect?

If you're reading these pages and something clicks for you, please reach out!

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