Healthcare’s Hidden Challenges & Solutions

Solving Healthcare’s Hidden Challenges: Insights from the Online Healthcare Summit

Healthcare leaders today are operating under a quiet but intensifying strain. Patient demand remains high, costs continue to climb, and administrative complexity shows no signs of slowing. For many practices, revenue growth has not translated into relief. In fact, it often brings the opposite  tighter margins, heavier workloads, and mounting operational pressure.

The Snapscale Online Healthcare Summit was built around one central question: how do modern practices grow without multiplying the chaos that comes with it?

Summit host Nathan Bush set the tone early.

“Healthcare leaders shouldn’t have to choose between growth and sanity… too many practices scale revenue, but they accidentally scale burnout, chaos, and overhead. It’s not real growth  it’s expensive stress.”

What followed was not theory, but a series of grounded, experience-driven perspectives from operators working on the front lines of healthcare transformation. Each speaker addressed a different pressure point : profitability, operational efficiency, patient acquisition, and cybersecurity  but the throughline was unmistakable: sustainable growth is engineered, not accidental.

Chris Mayan: Why Profit Is Leaking Faster Than Revenue Is Growing

One of the most persistent frustrations among physicians is the widening gap between top-line growth and personal take-home income. Many practices are busier than ever, yet owners feel financially compressed.

Tax strategist Chris Mayan addressed the uncomfortable truth behind this pattern. In his view, the issue is rarely lack of production. It is structural inefficiency.

“The number one profit leak in any business in the United States is our taxes.” — Chris Mahan

The problem, he explained, is not that physicians are making mistakes. It is that most are operating with reactive tax preparation instead of proactive tax strategy. The difference between the two is material.

“You want a strategist, not a preparer.” — Chris Mayan

Practices that treat taxes as a once-a-year event almost always leave money on the table. Those that design their financial architecture intentionally tend to unlock meaningful retained profit without increasing patient volume.

Engineering Profit Retention

Mayan’s framework begins with a simple shift in mindset. Taxes should be forecasted and modeled throughout the year, not discovered at filing time. From there, entity structure becomes the primary lever. When income flows through the right entities in the right sequence, the financial impact compounds quickly.

Within that structure, several tactical opportunities consistently surface. Strategic deduction timing, the use of donor advised funds that provide an immediate deduction while assets grow tax-advantaged, and properly structured family payroll strategies can all improve household tax efficiency. For practice owners with real estate, cost segregation studies remain one of the most underutilized tools for accelerating depreciation and improving near-term cash flow.

“It’s all about the time value of money.” — Chris Mayan

• He also pointed to the Augusta Rule, health savings accounts  which he described as “a Roth IRA on steroids”  and cash balance plans for high earners as powerful but often overlooked levers when implemented correctly. In one case shared during the session, a properly designed strategy helped shield roughly $483,000 in a single year.

The broader message was clear. Sustainable growth is not just about producing more. It is about protecting what is already being produced.

“It’s not what you make  it’s what you keep.” — Chris Mayan

Practices that adopt this posture often discover hidden financial capacity. One example cited during the session uncovered approximately $300,000 that could be reinvested back into the practice  without adding a single new patient.

Debra Phairas: The Operational Blind Spots Driving Costs Higher

If Chris Mayan focused on financial leakage, Debrah Phairas turned the spotlight toward operational drag  the slow, often invisible force pushing practice expenses upward year after year.

Her starting point was direct: most practices are not suffering from lack of effort. They are suffering from lack of visibility and resistance to change.

“Change is the worst swear word in the medical office.” — Debra Phairas

That cultural resistance creates a dangerous blind spot. Teams default to:

• “That’s how we’ve always done it.”
  
  
• “It works well enough.”
  
  
• “We don’t want to disrupt the staff.”

Despite rising costs across the industry, many teams remain anchored to legacy workflows simply because they feel familiar. Over time, that comfort becomes expensive.

The Discipline of Measurement

Phairas emphasized that high-performing practices share one consistent habit: they benchmark relentlessly.

“Better performing practices benchmark and compare against their peers.” — Debrah Phairas

When leadership teams regularly evaluate revenue per provider, staffing ratios, overhead percentages, and net collection performance, inefficiencies surface quickly. Without that discipline, practices are effectively operating without instrumentation.

From there, staffing becomes the largest and most controllable lever. In many specialties, personnel costs represent the majority of overhead. Even modest adjustments  such as flexible scheduling, calibrated full-time equivalents per provider, or expanded use of part-time support  can materially improve margins without compromising care delivery. Phairas noted that reducing as little as 0.25 to 0.5 FTE per physician can meaningfully shift the financial picture.

Technology, when deployed with intention, becomes another force multiplier. Self check-in tools, EMR automation, queue management systems, and the growing use of AI or remote scribes can simultaneously reduce friction and expand provider capacity.

Just as important is routine expense scrutiny. Vendor contracts, payment processing fees, communication platforms, and lease agreements often drift upward over time. In one example she shared, a practice discovered its rent placed it in the 75th percentile of overhead. Renegotiation alone produced a meaningful cost correction.

Yet her strongest point was cultural. Operational improvement only sticks when efficiency becomes part of the organization’s identity.

“If your practice isn’t comparing itself, you’re flying blind.” — Debrah Phairas

Practices that normalize performance conversations, set clear productivity expectations, and encourage frontline input tend to compound small gains into significant long-term advantage.

“Make change a business conversation, not a battle.” — Debrah Phairas

Eric Caballero: Why Patient Growth Stalls in Plain Sight

While financial and operational efficiency dominate internal discussions, growth strategist Eric Caballero highlighted a different bottleneck  one that sits squarely in the market’s perception of modern care models.

For innovative structures such as Direct Primary Care, the primary barrier is rarely clinical quality. It is clarity.

“Nine times out of 10, it’s not a care problem. It’s a clarity problem.” — Eric Caballero

In crowded healthcare markets, confusion quietly kills conversion. When prospective patients cannot quickly understand how a model works or why it benefits them, interest rarely progresses to action.

“Confusion is the opposite of trust.” — Eric Caballero

Creating Patient Pull Instead of Chasing Volume

Caballero’s approach begins with message precision. Every practice, he argued, should be able to articulate its value proposition in one clean, repeatable sentence. If the explanation requires too much context, it is already losing effectiveness.

From there, education becomes the primary growth engine. In healthcare especially, trust builds before the first appointment. Content that answers real patient questions  how the model works, who it serves best, and what makes it different  reduces friction long before the sales conversation begins.

Equally important is audience focus. Practices that attempt to market broadly often dilute their resonance. Those that identify and speak directly to high-fit patient segments tend to see stronger conversion and retention.

Operational alignment closes the loop. Marketing promises must be visibly supported by the patient experience. Claims of around-the-clock access, premium service, or simplified membership must be reflected in actual workflows. Consistency is what converts curiosity into loyalty.

“Can you explain why your practice exists in one sentence that converts?” — Eric Caballero

Practices that resolve this clarity gap often shift from chasing patients to attracting the right ones to a far more efficient growth model.

David Shay: Why Cybersecurity Is Now an Operational Imperative

The final pressure point addressed at the summit was one many practices still underestimate until it is too late: cybersecurity.

David Shay reframed the issue away from tools and toward culture.

“A strong cybersecurity culture is one where this stuff is talked about all the time. It’s normalized, not just an afterthought.” — David Shay

Too many organizations, he noted, treat cyber protection as a technical checkbox. In reality, most breaches still trace back to human behavior rather than system failure.

Building Resilience Into Everyday Operations

Effective protection begins with staff awareness. Regular phishing simulations, short-form training, and  critically  psychological safety around reporting suspicious activity dramatically reduce risk exposure. Teams that feel comfortable raising concerns early often prevent incidents from escalating.

From there, layered defense becomes essential. Email filtering, multi-factor authentication, endpoint protection, and secure backups create redundancy that catches threats when a single control fails.

HIPAA readiness must also be treated as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time compliance exercise. Encryption standards, secure communication platforms, and thorough documentation of policies and training often determine whether an audit becomes routine or disruptive.

Perhaps Shay’s most sobering reminder was this: breaches are not a question of if, but when. Practices that prepare response plans, validate backups, and establish trusted IT partnerships convert potential crises into manageable events.

“When staff knows to stop and ask if something is safe, you’re running ahead of the threats, not behind.” — David Shay

The Throughline: Growth Without the Chaos

Across four very different domains  tax strategy, operations, patient acquisition, and cybersecurity a consistent pattern emerged.

Healthcare practices are not struggling because demand is weak. They are struggling because complexity compounds faster than systems evolve to manage it.

The leaders who break through are the ones who:

Design their financial architecture intentionally.
Measure operations with discipline.
Communicate their value with clarity.
And build security into everyday culture.

The Online Healthcare Summit did not promise shortcuts. Instead, it offered something more valuable  a clear, experience-backed roadmap for practices that want to grow without sacrificing margin, team stability, or peace of mind.

The message to healthcare leaders is simple: the pressure is real, but so are the solutions when strategy replaces reaction.