Managing Through Change: A Consultant's Perspective

The most common response to rising healthcare costs is to skip straight to solutions. That reflex is the core of the problem. Costs are a symptom, not a diagnosis, and most benefits strategies fail because they never spend enough time on defining the problem.

Andrew Fondow, a veteran benefits advisor, builds his practice on the opposite habit. The framework starts with perception. How you see determines what you see, and what you see determines how you act. Every solution in this practice gets personally tested or placed with a family member or friend before it reaches a client.

The result is a practice built on lived experience rather than vendor decks. It produces moments like the one where a patient felt their toes for the first time in seven years after trying a solution no one had brought to them before. That story lands differently with a CFO than a cost projection does.

The industry mostly avoids a pointed question about point solutions. Why are these companies selling to HR departments instead of to physician groups and physical therapists? The answer is simple. Fee-for-service medicine has no financial incentive to adopt tools that keep patients out of surgery. That gap between where solutions are sold and where clinical decisions get made is exactly where the next wave of durable change has to happen.

The employers getting real traction heading into 2027 are pulling on three levers that others aren't. They're directing employees to higher-quality care, bringing care closer to where people live, and going directly to pharma on prescription drugs. What those organizations tend to have in common isn't a better vendor stack. It's leadership that treats benefits as a human problem first, builds genuine intimacy with its advisors, and holds itself accountable for outcomes.

Watch Andrew Fondow’s candid conversation about the realities of driving change in large, complex organizations. From building internal buy-in to navigating carrier relationships, Andrew shares the practical strategies he uses to help clients move from awareness to action, as well as the common pitfalls that derail even the best-intentioned benefits redesigns.