Physio2U: Telehealth in the Time of COVID-19

The owner of Physio2U, the largest provider of in-home physical rehabilitation services in Western Canada, was forced to rapidly transition to telehealth amid the growing threat of COVID-19 in early 2020. While the Physio2U team and its patients were pleasantly surprised by their success with telehealth, as vaccination rates increased and the threat of COVID-19 infection became less significant, she had some tough decisions to make. She wondered if telehealth was (a) just a temporary solution to survive the pandemic; or (b) an opportunity for her business going forward. Before she invested any more resources in telehealth, including marketing funds, the owner needed to make sure she had both a strong business case and a comprehensive strategy for offering telehealth post-pandemic.

This case can be used in courses on marketing management, marketing and technology, service marketing, or innovation at the upper-division undergraduate level or graduate level. It can be used to explore different ways of thinking about businesses in times of crises, how to adopt very different delivery models, and how a business can go back to doing what it used to do, if necessary, following a crisis. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:<ul><li>Understand that business leaders can turn around negative situations in times of crises to unearth new business opportunities.</li><li>Show how a business can use technology to pivot its business model rapidly, including a change from being place-based and limited to a physical location to being space-based and available anywhere.</li><li>Explore how place- versus space-based business models may be particularly appealing to different types of consumers.</li><li>Evaluate the conditions under which a business might need to return to its roots once the crisis that initially caused a change in the delivery model has passed.</li></ul>

• market space
• health care
• market research
• market segmentation
• innovation
• digitalization