Fulcrum Strategies, analyzing changes in health care and how they affect you

After the pandemic, when life returns to something resembling "normal", what will medical practices need to do to stay afloat in a perhaps seriously damaged economy? The same challenges all businesses face will still be there, but what new obstacles will be placed in your path? Ron discusses the importance of developing both strategies and tactics that will increase practices' chances of success in a post-COVID marketplace.

Evolved consumers will have new demands of their physicians. Successful practices will identify and adopt strategies to work with their highly-informed patients. Practices that cling to the old ways of seeing and treating patients may find their patient populations shifting increasingly toward Medicare and Medicaid as more demanding and better-equipped consumers find doctors who will meet their expectations.

After the pandemic many industries will likely change the way they do business going forward. What could this mean for physician practices, and how must they evolve to survive and thrive? We'll discuss the possibilities of altered and reduced benefit plans, and their impact on physician business strategy as employers look for places to reduce expenses.

What will the landscape look like after we've come through the other side of COVID and a presidential election? Depending on who wins, we could see very different approaches to getting the economy back on track, with very different consequences for medical providers. Ron discusses some of the possible steps Trump and Biden could take to help rebuild the economy when it comes to health care spending.

Economists are concerned we're heading for a "perfect storm", driven by COVID and made more severe by pre-existing economic pressures. In this series we'll be looking at the individual components, how they came together to form this perfect economic storm, and what physician practices can do to safely weather the deluge.

We continue our look into what health care could look like post-COVID. We know a new, digital-native consumer will likely dominate the patient pool, but what other changes are we likely to see? What changes will a successful practice need to make to keep up - and ahead of - changing times?

We've all spent a month or more in government-ordered quarantine, is it finally time to open businesses and get back to "normal" life? The economy has taken an immense hit, but what are the health consequences of abruptly reversing our social distancing measures? Polar opposite answers to these questions have emerged, and as usual, the best answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

What will the new consumer of health care look like after the pandemic? What will practices be looking for in "the right patient"? The digital age is going to catch up to practices, a successful group will have to be ready to accommodate patients who've grown up with instant access and digital self-service right from their phones. Phone prompt menus and paperwork in triplicate will not satisfy the digital natives who now make up a large part of the patient population.

The massive impact the coronavirus has had on our economy has us asking what our government can do to help. Washington has taken a massive step with the recent stimulus, but what else can be done to help allocate resources for those most in need?

While there's no doubt the current steps we're taking to slow the spread of the virus has been harming the economy, it's important to remember health care providers and first responders aren't just braving infection to care for us, they're doing so while suffering the same financial harm many other businesses are. Visits are down, elective procedures have been called off, most physician groups are seeing substantial reductions in revenue - all while continuing in their mission to provide care to those in need.