Optimizing Healthcare Strategies During Post-Pandemic Recovery

The pandemic accelerated several trends that indicate a waning reliance on traditional healthcare delivery systems. These trends include care delivery alignment with regulations focused on prevention and cost containment, increased access to ambulatory care, home and community-based services, and technological innovation that deepens the shift in care to the outpatient setting or out of a clinical setting entirely (e.g. telehealth). COVID surges strained resources on the acute care platform, resulting in lost revenue and delayed care. Meanwhile, procedural and diagnostic platforms sat idle. Many of those who suffered from the virus continue to experience a wide variety of ailments ranging from anxiety, depression, and psychosis to heart, lung, and inflammation issues. Many patients will even require long-term management of COVID symptoms. Much of this monitoring and care will indeed take place outside traditional models.

Acceleration of these trends will require the leadership of health systems and hospitals to double down on their facility and access strategies to respond to change. The traditional approach to master planning, in which forecasted facility demands consider changing utilization rates, ceases to be reliable. A switch to home-based and digital care demands the same attention as growth and shifts inside the acute care and ambulatory clinical platforms. Additionally, as Medicare reimbursement is now more closely tied to patients’ satisfaction with their overall care experiences, providers are incented to improve quality of care. Competition is no longer just the health system down the street — it is a less structured, consumer- and employer-driven environment increasingly influenced by ambulatory, chronic, and post-acute care delivery. Health systems must remain nimble and flexible to effectively compete with more sophisticated players while continuing to address the local community’s health needs entering this post-COVID environment. Finally, interoperability and advancing health technology such as Apple Watches, ECG monitors, biosensors, and other wearables will continue to disrupt the way consumers track their health and receive care.

3. Increased accessibility through digital and home-based solutions

The pandemic saw a substantial and necessary increase in telehealth visits as hospitals and other facilities closed. A recent Mayo Clinic and MITRE Corporation study showed that telehealth visits increased between 10- and 100-times prior volumes in most states between February and April of 2020, followed by a gradual decline. However, between September and December of 2020, telehealth visits with primary clinical classifications such as respiratory, infectious and parasitic diseases, neoplasms, musculoskeletal and connective, circulatory, nervous and sensory organs, endocrine, and digestive systems rebounded by an average growth of approximately 21% (COVID-19 | Healthcare Coalition, 2021).

By 2030, up to 30% of ambulatory visits could be telehealth visits.

While states have seen a drop-off in telehealth visits, many health care providers will continue to utilize this technology — especially as it relates to mental health conditions. For example, in April of this year, mental health conditions accounted for approximately 58% of telehealth visits by diagnosis (Fair Health, 2021). According to Sg2 (2021), by 2030, up to 30% of ambulatory visits could be telehealth visits, with many of these in behavioral health and as a complement to traditional office utilization in other medical and even surgical specialties, such as for post-surgical follow up visits.

NATIONAL TELEHEALTH CLAIMS
JANUARY 2019 THROUGH DECEMBER 2020

Strategic Planning Requires Attention in Six Areas

Now that we’ve identified key trends driving how health systems will emerge from the pandemic, your strategic planning efforts require attention in six key areas:

1. Reducing operating costs in inpatient, outpatient, and physician services to optimize contracting leverage: the increasing penalty for lack of price transparency may yet improve the incentive to focus on relationships
2. Optimizing scope and access to primary and preventive health services to focus on whole-person care: this includes taking an active role in ensuring not only health and wellbeing, but also:
   • Behavioral and psychological health
   • Management of prescription drugs along with over-the-counter medications
   • Nutrition as medicine
3. Integrating digital connectivity across all domains of care management, such as care at home, post-acute transitions, and for customer relationship management
4. Rationalizing capital and operating resources in the inpatient portfolio to optimize access, care coordination, payor contracts, patient access, volume, outcomes, and reputation
5. Modernizing the master facility plan to optimize “bricks and clicks” access, competitive positioning, market growth opportunities, and efficiency
6. Equipping leadership and governance to optimize monitoring and dynamic, strategic responses to changing market conditions