2025 In Review: Highlights from a Transformational Year at the Alliance

This year, the Alliance for Health Policy kept the wind in our sails from 2024 and continued to rack up breakthroughs in our programming.

Most notably, we launched and completed our first-ever Congressional Fellowship, deepening our historic organizational commitment to educating early-career Hill staff. It marked an evolution of how the Alliance supports the next generation of health policymakers, moving from one-off education to more sustained, relationship-driven learning. We built a curriculum that featured input from senior Hill staffers, health policy experts, and those with experience developing adult educational programs. Our team created the back-end capabilities to ensure our fellows could access program resources, and engaged more than 30 experts through the program.

The results are in: the first fellowship cohort was a resounding success! We recruited 30 outstanding staffers from both chambers and both parties, representing 19 states across the U.S., and covered timely, relevant topics like reconciliation, CBO, and how to work with Committees staff with seasoned experts ready to give examples, share stories, and explain complexities. We could not be prouder of our fellows, who jumped into the program with enthusiasm, curiosity, and commitment, sharing their questions, preferences, and learning with us. The Alliance team heeded the advice of senior Hill staff to create a curriculum that went beyond content knowledge to build skills and networks. To do that, we built new platforms for conversations, invited the fellows’ direction on the topics they were most interested in, and tried new ways of collaborative learning, including salon-style dinners and “expert office hours.” We can’t wait for 2026, as 100% of fellows want to continue engaging with the Alliance in future educational work, so our plan for next year will not only include recruiting a 2026 class, but also adding alumni programs.

We had wins across the rest of our educational programs as well. We hosted one of our most successful Signature Series ever by applying our “Incubate to Educate” program lifecycle to the key issue of Aging policy. Across workshops, a public Summit, webinars, and a Congressional briefing (covered by C-SPAN), we had the opportunity to listen and learn from dozens of leaders across the health care spectrum. We highlighted these expert voices in our insights report, which articulated the complex issues of aging policy, an area that intertwines health and financial policy in fundamental and unique ways. We outlined this and other themes in our final series report. Based on feedback from our community, we also experimented with new, human-centered formats, including interactive moments that reminded us how lived experience and policy are inseparable. This work set the stage for our upcoming 2026 Signature Series on Health Care Payment, where we will apply these same principles to another foundational policy challenge.

Another standout this year was our Health Policy Forecast, where we hosted multiple panels on hot topics with sought-after speakers, a sold-out public event with 178 in attendance, and an incredible reception following with hundreds of Alliance community members.

Our Signature Seminars continued as our listening engine, bringing together experts to surface shared language, points of confusion, and opportunities for better policymaker education. This year, we unpacked evergreen tough topics, like “How Health Insurance Works,” where we generated an insights report featuring the new “Iceberg Model,” and published a seminar report with our recommendations for education on this often misunderstood topic. We just wrapped our seminar workshops on a fast-moving, more novel topic: Cell and Gene Therapy, and will release our insights and seminar reports in early 2026.

We learned so much through these events, and the virtual educational briefings we held on Medicare Advantage and AI in health, two of our highest-attended webinars in recent history.

These successful events were made possible by our committed and generous sponsors, like our year-end sponsor American Academy of Family Physicians, who show up for our organization and provide meaningful support for our mission of health policy education.

We know that 2025 has been a year of extraordinary change for health policy. Conversations can often feel fragmented and reactive. But our work this year showed there’s still room for designing opportunities for shared learning, context, and mutual respect.

Here’s to a great 2026 ahead!

Claire Sheahan, M.Sc.

President and CEO
Alliance for Health Policy

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