Lifestyle

Meet The Man Keeping Thousands of Families Safe: Justin Hermann

Published

5 years ago

July 23, 2021

Family safety shouldn’t be a choice but a priority for everyone. One of the ways of ensuring family safety is by ensuring there is financial stability in the family. Most employers are now providing life insurance coverage for their employees. Supplemental life insurance is bridging the shortfall in coverage and providing added protection for families.

Justin Hermann is already at the top of the game. He helps serve working families through supplemental life insurance benefits that their unions/associations have endorsed for their members to fill in the gaps of what they can’t get through work and provide them with what they need even after they leave or retire. He leads an agency in a regional leadership position in more than ten states and is on a mission to protect and serve 80,000+ working families a year by 2030.

Changing Paths

Justin is an alumnus of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity ASU. He pursued a Bachelor of Science in Construction Management. Additionally, Justin started his career with leading technical builders helping build hospitals as a project engineer. However, three months later, he found a new passion.

Justin wanted to serve families and help them acquire financial stability. He understood that he had to focus on his goal and work hard for him to be successful. Success doesn’t just happen; you create it. He wanted to become successful by becoming a better person professionally. Within the first year, Justin had already made six figures in an industry he had not studied for. He was also helping others achieve the six-figure mark.

Helping Families

During the first month of his new career, Justin learned his way around the business. He moved to the leadership position in his second month, and in the third month, he led in sales as a top 5 producer for their AZ, NM, TX agency. It was during his third month that he helped a 22-year-old couple. He processed a death claim for their child that he had seen three weeks prior. This encounter helped him find a purpose for what he was doing for families.

A year later, Justin was working at a regional level with an agency whose vision was expansion. In the second year, he helped open two more offices, where he moved to Texas to help lead. Justin earned a spot on the board of directors. These ranks positioned Justin to serve families better. Justin’s company understands that claims need to be paid fast, people who need the services served, and families provided for.

Justin’s Strategies

Justin puts people first. He ensures he offers professional client services. He has learned to overcome his obstacles and trust the process for his success. What distinguishes him from the rest in the industry is that his technical skills are excellent, allowing him to best understand what families need. He always brings a competitive spirit to the table. And guess what? Justin is working for the number one life insurance company in North America with more policies in place than any other company, allowing him and his team to build lifetime renewals that are rare to find in his industry and or any industry. This ensures a balance between client/agent relationship and company/agent/client relationship where everyone wins and has support now and in the future.

You can connect with Justin here.

Lifestyle

Kat Marie Alvarez: Where Innovation Meets Regulation

Published

14 hours ago

January 23, 2026

Michelle Langton

Regulation is often thought of as a limitation, yet in healthcare, it also serves as a foundation for building models that endure. For Kat Marie Alvarez, Founder and CEO of KATALYST & CO, the framework of rules established by agencies like CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid) and the OIG ( office of the Inspector General) create opportunities to design systems that are compliant, ethical, and transformative. Her approach demonstrates that regulation can be a platform for innovation when it is interpreted with both technical rigor and vision.

Kat’s 25-year career reflects this philosophy. A former nurse who advanced into executive leadership and strategy, she has led $2.7B+ P&L operations, advised on over $5B in healthcare transactions, and guided value based organizations including Innovacare, Cano Health, WellMed, Centene, and Humana through periods of exponential scaling. Her perspective combines clinical, financial, and regulatory experience, giving her a unique ability to design structures that support integrity and accountability while driving measurable outcomes.

Turning Statutes into Strategy

For Kat, regulation serves as a framework for building smarter and more ethical models. She interprets CMS guidance and OIG rules as levers for innovation, using them to advance integrity and accountability. With the CMS V28 risk adjustment model, Alvarez refined coding practices, strengthened clinical documentation, and structured risk frameworks that reward accuracy and elevate standards of care. In addressing RADV audits, she crafted strategies that protect stakeholders while keeping patient outcomes at the forefront. She aligns compliance, cost, and care in equal measure. Her current work as a contributor to the CMS IDea Challenge, an initiative focused on strengthening the foundation of trust in our system, further echoes her commitment to advancing regulations in ways that unlock innovation while safeguarding the integrity of care.

Her interpretive approach brings discipline and vision to every challenge. She engages stakeholders to redesign workflows that meet regulatory requirements and enhance the patient experience. Each policy becomes a mechanism to strengthen accountability and operational precision, shaping a system that is both compliant and humane.

Innovation Built Within Boundaries

At KATALYST & CO, this interpretive approach is carried into every project. Kat has integrated predictive analytics and AI-driven tools into care models, with safeguards that ensure interventions remain clinician-led and ethically sound. For example, AI flags in chronic disease management are connected to human-led actions that improve patient care. The result is a model that benefits from technology while preserving accountability and clinical integrity.

Staffing and infrastructure provide another example of her philosophy in action. By leveraging offshore BPO operations in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, KATALYST & CO extends capacity for health plans and providers. These expansions are carefully designed to meet data security, licensure, and jurisdictional requirements, ensuring that global reach is paired with local compliance. It is a system that balances scale with responsibility.

The Art of Influence Through Alignment

Kat often describes her role as translating complexity into clarity. Whether she is working with payers, providers, or investors, she builds consensus by grounding ambitious strategies in the language of statute. Value-based care models, utilization management programs, and clinical frameworks are designed to prove compliant ROI for stakeholders while maintaining patient focus.

Her approach begins with people. In integrations, partnerships, and platform builds, she respects legacy strengths, listens to frontline voices, and creates systems that are not only efficient but also trusted. This ensures that compliance does not feel like restriction, but like a structure that supports innovation and adoption.

Redefining the Future of Compliance and Care

KATALYST & CO is scaling with $10M in initial funding, expanded international operations, and a growing advisory portfolio. Under Kat’s leadership, the firm is showing how regulation can be a foundation for both innovation and durability. She demonstrates that lasting progress in healthcare is achieved by leaders who know how to design systems that are bold, ethical, and deeply human.

By approaching regulation as a guide rather than a limitation, Kat Alvarez is building models that prove compliance and innovation can move forward together. Her formula ensures that the future of healthcare is shaped not only by ambition, but also by trust and responsibility.