Built to Fix the Gaps

About Jeremy Fairbanks

Jeremy Fairbanks Tennessee roots run deep, and so does his reason for doing this work. He holds a degree in health systems administration from a regional state university in Tennessee, and he has spent roughly a decade building Clearpath Health Consulting into a firm that independent clinic groups and rural care cooperatives across the mid-South actually rely on. His focus is the machinery behind patient care: revenue-cycle gaps, staffing models, coordination infrastructure, the unglamorous systems that determine whether medicine reaches people correctly.

He did not start out on his own. After college, Jeremy spent several years inside a large regional hospital network, learning care operations from the inside out. He was promoted twice. But institutional inertia kept shelving the ideas that might have moved the needle. One care-coordination pilot he had designed, complete with detailed projections and staff interviews, was shelved without explanation. He handed in his notice shortly after. He launched Clearpath out of a spare bedroom in Nashville with three clients, one decent laptop, and something to prove. That was about a decade ago.

What drives Jeremy is not abstract. He grew up watching his grandfather, who had a heart condition, come home from appointments frustrated and confused, bounced between providers who were not talking to each other. Jeremy was around twelve years old when he decided that disorganization, not malice, was the thing failing people like his grandfather. That early frustration became a professional north star. It also shaped how he works now: he calls out structural problems plainly, leads with what clients actually value before he leads with data, and holds himself to the same standard he holds everyone else. The book that shifted his consulting approach most was Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, which reframed how he thinks about persuasion and evidence.

He runs Clearpath lean on purpose. No corporate hierarchy. Clients call him directly, and he intends to keep it that way. He also does periodic pro-bono consulting for a community health cooperative east of Nashville that serves a largely uninsured rural population, the kind of organization his grandfather never had access to. Outside client work, Jeremy coaches an under-fourteen recreational soccer team in the Nashville area. He took it on because his nephew needed a coach. He stayed because coaching twelve-year-olds taught him more about motivation and resilience than most leadership seminars ever have.

When deadlines and travel stack up, Jeremy heads for the Smokies. A serious trail, not a walk, something steep enough to require full attention, is how he resets. He tries to get one in at least twice a month. He describes the physical discipline and the mental reset as feeding each other. His definition of success has changed over the years too. Early on it was revenue and reputation. Now it is simpler: does a facility function better after he leaves than it did when he arrived, and does that improvement hold? Long-term, client-owned improvement. That is what he is building toward.