The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch
The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch brings healthcare strategy professionals into the room with leading health system executives to explore how innovation, clinical leadership, and enterprise strategy intersect. Designed for strategy executives, physician leaders, and healthcare innovators, the podcast offers actionable takeaways to help organizations drive both clinical and financial impact.
The Strategy Catalyst Dispatch
The Strategist in Brief: March 6, 2025
This episode covers the hospital-at-home market through interviews with leaders from Mass General Brigham, Mayo Clinic, Advocate Health, and Mount Sinai, highlighting how programs are diversifying revenue beyond Medicare and finding strategic value despite not reaching financial breakeven. The episode also covers Walgreens' potential private equity deal with Sycamore Partners, Teladoc's stock drop amid AI-generated therapy allegations, and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson's decision to maintain stricter merger guidelines from the Biden era.
This is the strategist in brief for March 6th, 2025. This week's key market dive looks at the hospital at home market. We spoke with program leaders from Mass General Brigham Mayo Clinic Advocate Health and Mount Sinai Health System to understand the factors that have helped their hospital at home programs and DUR scale. While bipartisan legislation to permanently extend the Medicare Hospital Home program was widely expected to pass last year. Opposition to a lame duck healthcare reform bill resulted in a temporary extension through March 31st. Health system programs have diversified the revenue away from Medicare by engaging with commercial payers and expanding into service lines outside the scope of the federal program, such as SNF at Home and Palliative Care at home. While most programs have not reached a financial breakeven point, health system leaders find strategic value in expanded capacity, higher quality, lower costs. And catering to consumer preferences. Staffing remains a key challenge, and some markets have more favorable conditions for a hospital at home than others, such as population density and Medicaid support. Our dive concludes the three snapshots of programs that have reached mature scale. Mayo Clinic's hub and spoke model with a virtual command center is extending its reach with advanced AI algorithms and remote patient monitoring capabilities. Mass General Brigham has continued to grow one of the largest programs in the country. By expanding to new patient populations and settings, Mount Sinai's experience underscores the importance of early partnerships, tech integration, and a supportive payer landscape. And now our first market scan, A new report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Walgreens deal with PE firm Sycamore Partners to go private has been revived. Sycamore is expected to keep the retail segment and spin off other parts of the business. This could help Walgreens core business find financial discipline, while also offering health systems or disruptors in opportunity to buy assets on the cheap if the healthcare business is sold for parts. In another bit of news, Teladoc saw its stock fall nearly 20% amid allegations that the company's therapists are cutting corners by using AI generated responses according to a report by short seller blue or cut capital, the controversy highlights the danger of unauthorized shadow AI use by clinical staff. The highlighted examples in the report show that consumers are on the lookout for AI generated content and feel discomfort with its use in certain healthcare settings. Especially where there's an expectation of privacy. Our final news item looks at the policy landscape for M and A FTC Chair. Andrew Ferguson notified his agency staff that the stricter merger guidelines finalized under President Biden in December, 2023 will remain in place. Ferguson emphasized the importance of regulatory stability for companies in courts in his memo. But the decision is likely disappointing for some business leaders who are anticipating a looser regulatory climate for m and a. Under the Trump administration, Ferguson left the door open to further revisions after a transparent review process. The decisions to keep the guidelines as is, is somewhat surprising given the Trump administration's tendency to swiftly reverse Biden era policies, but the new administration could enforce them differently in practice health systems and their provider rivals. We'll continue to face constraints on their ability to expand via m and a and merging parties will likely adopt best effort covenants and breakup fees to reduce the risk of failed deals. That concludes this week's strategist. In brief, please check out the full version on the web@hmacademy.com. Thanks for listening.