Tammy Earnhardt, Founder
Earnhardt Consulting advises executives and boards on growth, expansion, and integration. The practice is built on more than 30 years of leadership inside healthcare systems, most recently as Senior Vice President of Strategy & Development at Health Connect America.
About
Tammy Earnhardt is a behavioral health strategic advisor with more than 30 years of experience driving growth and development across healthcare systems. She spent nearly two decades at Health Connect America, a behavioral health and foster care provider headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee, where she rose to Senior Vice President of Strategy & Development. There she worked at the point where strategy meets daily operations: growth across state lines, new models of integrated care, and the workforce those models depend on. She also held all of the organization's payor relationships. Today, investors and organizations consult her as an expert through GLG, AlphaSights, VISASQ/COLEMAN, and Apex Leaders.
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Services
Engagements are shaped around the organization's goals, from a defined growth plan to ongoing counsel for the executive team. Core areas of work:
Growth plans grounded in operational reality: market selection, service line priorities, and the sequencing that keeps quality intact while the organization expands.
Guidance for organizations entering new states, covering licensure pathways, payer landscapes, staffing models, and how each state system works on the ground.
Design and rollout of integrated care models that connect behavioral health with the broader systems a family touches, built to work in daily practice, not just on paper.
Support through evaluation, diligence, and integration, with attention to culture, clinical continuity, and the staff experience on both sides of a transaction.
Help working through complex regulatory environments in behavioral health and child welfare, where requirements shift across states, payers, and accrediting bodies.
Practical strategy for engaging and keeping frontline staff, drawn from programs Tammy led at Health Connect America to strengthen connection and retention among early-career workers.
At Health Connect America, Tammy held all of the organization's payor relationships and built a large network of executive-level relationships with managed care organizations across the country. She advises on payor strategy and the managed care relationships that growth depends on.
Tammy tracks Medicaid trends and advises executives, owners, founders, and private equity firms on what is changing in Medicaid and how to pivot within the healthcare industry. She maintains strong connections at CMS.
Strategy that holds up where the work happens: in homes, in programs, and in the daily lives of families.
Board Service
Tammy is actively seeking board service with behavioral health and child welfare organizations. She brings a director's view that is grounded in operations: multi-state growth, regulatory oversight, workforce risk, and the integration questions that follow an acquisition.
Nominating committees look for exactly that combination. Behavioral health governance carries clinical, regulatory, and workforce considerations that general board experience alone does not cover. Tammy has sat with those questions as an executive and can help a board ask them well.
Start Here
Answer three questions about your organization. At the end you can book a call, call directly, or send your answers to Tammy by email.
Results
Frontline turnover is one of the defining challenges in behavioral health. At Health Connect America, Tammy championed a program to meet it directly.
Working with SigBee, Health Connect America introduced a daily check-in platform that gave frontline staff a simple way to be heard and gave leaders a clearer read on how teams were doing. The effort focused on connection and retention, particularly among younger workers entering the field, a group the industry has struggled to keep.
The program is documented in a published case study on the engagement work at Health Connect America.
Advisory engagements and board service both start the same way: a conversation about your organization and where it is headed.
Book a callContact
For advisory engagements, board service inquiries, or an introductory call, reach out directly or book a time.
