Jarrard Inc.: The Nashville Healthcare Communications Firm Now Inside Chartis

Edited on July 18, 2026.

Jarrard Inc. — historically Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock — is the Nashville and Chicago-based strategic communications and stakeholder engagement firm specializing in healthcare providers. Founded in 2006, the firm was acquired by Chartis — the leading healthcare advisory firm — in November 2021, and now operates as the strategic communications practice inside one of the most consequential healthcare consulting platforms in the United States.

Positioning

Jarrard occupies a specific structural niche most PR firms cannot compete for: healthcare provider communications at the intersection of strategy, change management, and stakeholder engagement. The firm's practice runs alongside health-system boards, C-suites, and physician leaders during moments of consequence — M&A, executive transitions, service-line changes, safety events, and payer disputes. Generalist firms with healthcare desks do not carry the same category depth. Sector-only firms without the operating consulting layer do not carry the same integrated strategy.

The Chartis acquisition compounded that positioning. Chartis is one of the leading healthcare-focused management consulting firms in the U.S., and combining Chartis's strategic advisory with Jarrard's communications expertise created a rare integrated platform serving health systems on both the strategy and the messaging that surrounds it.

Practice Areas

Strategic Positioning & Reputation

Health-system positioning, market-competitive reputation strategy, and category-defining narrative development for hospital systems, academic medical centers, and provider networks.

Issue Navigation & Crisis Communications

Patient-safety events, litigation communications, executive misconduct response, regulatory investigations, and financial-distress messaging. Healthcare crisis is one of the most narrowly-specialized categories in communications; Jarrard is one of the firms most often referenced when the crisis is category-specific.

Change Management Communications

Internal and organizational communications during executive transitions, leadership changes, service-line restructures, layoffs, and post-M&A integration. The change-management practice is the operating link between the strategy work and the visible communications.

M&A Communications

Hospital and health-system mergers, joint ventures, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships. Healthcare M&A messaging is regulator-, physician-, patient-, employee-, and community-facing simultaneously — the multi-audience complexity that defines the specialty.

Employee, Physician & Patient Engagement

Workforce communications, physician-alignment programs, and patient-experience messaging — the categories most closely tied to measurable outcomes like Press Ganey scores, physician retention, and workforce engagement metrics.

Track Record

Jarrard has served 300-plus healthcare clients across 40 states — one of the deepest healthcare client bases of any communications firm in the U.S. That scale is what has made the firm the reference case in the category and the acquisition target Chartis pursued.

The Chartis Integration

Chartis acquired Jarrard in November 2021. Under the combined structure, Jarrard operates as the strategic communications and stakeholder engagement practice inside the broader Chartis healthcare advisory platform. The integrated model offers health-system clients a single partner for strategic advisory, operational consulting, informatics and analytics, and communications — the four disciplines most consequential to health-system performance.

Where Jarrard fits in the PR firm landscape

Healthcare communications is one of the most concentrated specialty categories in the PR firm landscape. The category leaders include Real Chemistry, Havas Health & You, Spectrum Science, Finn Partners' healthcare practice, IMRE, Sam Brown Inc., and the historical Lippe Taylor (now /prompt). Jarrard's differentiation inside that set is the provider-only specialty combined with the change-management practice depth — the operating layer that most healthcare PR firms do not carry.

For the full landscape, see the Healthcare PR section of the PR Firms Directory.

Related Coverage

• PR Firms Directory — A–Z, by Specialty, by Region
• Healthcare PR Firms
• Lovell Communications — Nashville Healthcare Specialist
• Nashville Public Relations Agencies
• Leading PR Firms Guide