Rethinking Provider Growth in the ‘Post-Post-Pandemic’ Era

In this edition of our blog series on some of the top healthcare trends of 2025, we’ll explore the shift to a new normal for healthcare provider organizations that the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped, and how the resulting ‘post-post-pandemic’ landscape drives the need for these organizations to adopt a new business model that balances innovation in patient outcomes with cost containment. While some aspects of healthcare are returning to a pre-pandemic state, the industry is still grappling with change across key areas, including staffing levels, care venues and market consolidation. These dynamics, among others, are causing health systems to reassess their growth strategy and adopt a new multi-pronged approach that increasingly leverages data-driven insights to guide strategic decision-making and optimize patient outcomes. 

Financial Challenges in a Shifting Revenue Landscape

Immediately following the pandemic, hospitals and health systems largely reduced¹ their optional services as they worked to recover from the strain caused by COVID-19. As time passed and hospital visits began returning to pre-pandemic levels, revenue and margin challenges persisted as the industry faced rising costs² for care delivery and the development³ of new facilities. In the post-post-pandemic era, reimbursements are decreasing as the revenue mix shifts. More than 25 million individuals were disenrolled⁴ following Medicaid redetermination, while commercial membership has shrunk. Since reimbursement by Medicare and Medicaid is less than commercial, provider organizations need to rethink their revenue mix and strategy. By utilizing reliable market intelligence and predictive modeling, health systems can better understand reimbursement trends and capitalize on services with a high return on investment for a proactive approach to maintaining financial stability. These insights empower provider organizations to stay on top of industry trends and strengthen their financial forecasting with visibility into payer mix shifts and other key revenue and margin changes. 

Market Challenges: Staffing, Patient Needs and Cybersecurity

Beyond the financial factors making strategic growth more complex, health systems face a litany of other challenges in the market. Pandemic-era retirements continue to exacerbate staffing shortages while medical school enrollments are generally down, making it harder to staff clinical operations. In tandem, patient needs are becoming more complex amid a rapidly aging⁵ population, while younger populations are presenting with chronic diseases earlier⁶. Care settings are also shifting as patients lean away from inpatient venues and toward outpatient, in-home and virtual settings. Additionally, as cybersecurity threats have ramped up, so has the pressure for provider organizations to invest in cybersecurity measures.

As health systems are increasingly reliant on workforce analytics to predict staffing shortages, optimize provider allocation and ensure adequate coverage in high-demand areas, real-time data updates play a crucial role in successfully addressing these issues. Accessing complete and accurate provider information through provider directories gives leadership full insight into pain points across provider organization operations to prioritize support where it’s needed most. 

These mounting challenges have also pushed provider organizations to explore alternative ways to maintain and grow their business. Organizations are moving toward a more specialized approach, aiming to deliver the highest quality care for select services to keep costs down, contain staffing needs and retain patients in key areas. With a renewed focus on building specialized care services that prioritize retention, provider organizations are realizing they need to be more thoughtful about patient communication, building personalized messaging that targets potential new patients across their markets and emphasizes how they can address needs across different populations.

Enhancing Patient Engagement to Drive Retention

In today’s shifting landscape, and given financial pressures, patient retention is more crucial than ever as patients become more informed and demanding consumers. There’s a greater effort to maintain engagement with existing patients between appointments to increase retention and improve health outcomes. By increasing consistent care touchpoints with offerings such as vaccines and screenings, patients can stay better informed and be active in their health management while encouraging a more preventive approach to care. With this renewed focus, provider organizations can leverage up-to-date patient insights to identify at-risk populations and personalize messaging to enhance engagement. 

These strategies, targeted at maximizing patient engagement and retention, are crucial at a time when routine check-ups are no longer enough. Provider organizations are adopting a more careful and exacting effort to keep patients within their system and reduce leakage to competitors or out-of-network referrals. These tailored interactions keep patients engaged and healthy. Patient outcomes are directly correlated with how engaged patients are with provider organizations and their care. Research shows that a long-term relationship with a doctor leads to better health results – one analysis⁷ found that when patients lose their longtime primary care doctor, the number of emergency department visits and hospital admissions increases, as does their mortality rate. 

Engagement and retention also ensure long-term financial stability for health systems. For healthcare providers to build meaningful patient connections, it’s important to understand the entirety of the patient journey. Using up-to-date contact data and social determinants of health insights can transform the patient experience with a more comprehensive view of each patient. Combining this with an optimized outreach approach using predictive analytics and up-to-date information builds a strong system for increased engagement.

Leveraging Data to Optimize Care Access 

 Another emerging trend is the use of key data variables such as population density, the state of existing healthcare access, and patient demand to focus on service expansion that adequately addresses the needs of underserved areas. With thorough market analysis leveraging de-identified medical claims data, organizations can holistically view care delivery, consumer behavior and provider dynamics to develop a successful strategy backed by actionable intelligence that benefits the patient experience. Healthcare organizations can leverage comprehensive claims data and analytics to assess the market with reliable insights to better understand
growth opportunities, provider movement and care partnerships, while establishing effective value-based strategies. Leveraging these data-driven insights enables healthcare providers to build a sound strategy that ensures targeted and sustainable growth. 

In this post-post-pandemic landscape, healthcare organizations have shifted to more focused growth that aims to enhance core capabilities while prioritizing needed services in underserved areas. When evaluating service lines, it’s advantageous to focus on areas where the organization outperforms competitors serving the same community. By leveraging comprehensive care delivery insights, organizations can strategically focus their efforts on improving care quality and efficiency in a few key service areas, enabling them to compete at a higher level and expand their reach to new patients in the region. Additionally, this method is more intentional and cost-efficient than attempting to grow every service, overly saturating the market.

Collaboration is another vital element of successful market growth. Creating valuable partnerships that provide needed support to close gaps in the market can benefit both organizations, building quality care while widening the consumer base on multiple fronts. For example, working with an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) provides value-add to a broader pool of patients, reducing costs while ensuring quality care delivery. Partnering with local employers can also benefit an employee base that’s well-served by an organization's capabilities, especially when there’s an opportunity for direct contracting to provide patients with the best value for health services. 

The Future of Data-Driven Growth in Healthcare

While provider organizations are making progress in using data insights to understand patient characteristics, identify ways to reduce patient loss and improve care coordination, many still lack a data-driven strategy that goes beyond patient acquisition. 

2025 will mark the expanded adoption of social determinants of health (SDOH) data, a critical resource for health systems as they increasingly explore growth outside of traditional areas and focus on core capabilities that best serve patients. These insights create a clear picture of each health system's market share by accounting for crucial patient information that typically isn’t gathered within the clinical setting, giving decision makers a full view of all factors at play when determining areas where their organization thrives, where there’s room for improvement and where expansion will be most successful. 

Comprehensive analysis of operations is another key aspect enabling organizations to optimize care and facilitate market growth. Data on physician productivity across the entire health system can provide a clear understanding of the rate at which services are being performed and billed, where they stand on quality and efficiency and what improvements can be made to enhance these efforts. 

Evaluating contracts can enable further improvements by maximizing value-based reimbursements and incentives while minimizing risk through a comprehensive approach to patient care. By addressing both SDOH and core medical needs, organizations can create a more holistic system to address key barriers to care. This awareness also helps identify areas where additional provider support may be needed to better meet the specific needs of the community. 

Building a Resilient Growth Strategy for the Future

As healthcare organizations adapt to improve and expand care delivery in this post-post-pandemic landscape, key insights to drive innovation and grow successfully will be crucial to success. Leveraging data-driven insights, strategically prioritizing specialized care, enhancing patient engagement and forging partnerships will all enable health systems to build a resilient growth strategy that meets the evolving needs of their communities. The organizations that embrace these shifts with a proactive and intentional approach will be best positioned to drive better patient outcomes and long-term financial stability in 2025 and beyond.

 

References:

¹ https://www.ache.org/blog/2020/restarting-elective-procedures-during-covid-19

² https://www.aha.org/costsofcaring

³ https://www.hfmmagazine.com/articles/4944-2024-hospital-construction-survey-results#:~:text=Times%20like%20these%20call%20for,components%20to%20stay%20on%20track.%E2%80%9D

⁴ https://www.kff.org/medicaid/press-release/as-medicaid-unwinding-concludes-in-most-states-kff-finds-25-million-lost-medicaid-coverage-but-enrollment-is-10-million-higher-than-pre-pandemic-levels/#:~:text=Tammie%20Smith,to%20complete%20regular%20renewal%20processes.

⁵ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/09/us-centenarian-population-is-projected-to-quadruple-over-the-next-30-years/#:~:text=There%20are%20currently%20roughly%2062,estimated%2023%25%20of%20the%20population.

⁶ https://pressroom.cancer.org/2025CancerFactsandFigures

⁷ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272723001093?via%3Dihub