September 23, 2025 12:00 pm
LVBCH welcomes back Ford Koles of the Advisory Board for a special webinar preview of the 2026 State of the Industry Presentation.
State of the Healthcare Industry - 2026 Preview
Part I – Evolving structural forces: The industry is still facing known pressures on its legacy structures (such as demographic trends, outpatient shifts, and payment transformation. But emerging disruptions–from drastic federal spending cuts to growing patient distrust to an unstable workforce–leave the future more uncertain than ever.
Part II – Strategic market activities: Despite the unknowns, the industry is not sitting still amid urgent vulnerabilities–with some players finding opportunities in gaps in the market. Both plans and providers are exploring more nuanced network steerage tactics, third party vendors are increasingly at the center of determining appropriateness of treatment decisions, and pharmacy players are expanding their competitive lanes.
Part III – Crossroads for incumbent health systems and health plans: Facing both the shifting structural forces and a frenzy of competitive activity, major regional systems and plans will need to set strategy that suits their strengths and the context of their market, as their performance will be interdependent with others across the community. AMCs will grow more selective with their business model, regional systems must place long-term infrastructure bets while absorbing spillover volumes from nearby service reductions, and Blues plans must balance their community value proposition with organizational restructuring to manage the realities of cost and utilization trends today.
Watch now:
This content is available to members and those who registered for this event – for assistance with the password, please contact lvbch@lvbch.com.
Ford Koles
Ford is one of Advisory Board’s preeminent thought leaders in the area of health system economics and strategy. He is a health care economist by training and has participated in every major Advisory Board research initiative since 1992. He is well-versed in health care history and the many reform initiatives we have lives through in the past three decades: coverage expansion; vertical integration and physician partnership models; managed care and payer contracting; horizontal integration and system economics of scale; and quality-based payment. Prior to joining Advisory Board, he was a management consultant for the Hay Group and Ernst & Young. He received his BA from Kenyon College, and his MA in Economics from Johns Hopkins University.