Midway through 2024, we are seeing a sustained trend of stronger performance. Revenue and expense trends and length of stay will be indicators for the months ahead, but for now, good planning and tough decisions are translating into better results.

A question often asked by health system leaders is what will be required for future success. Responses from some of Kaufman Hall’s smartest consultants are featured in this new blog from Ken Kaufman. One common element: The need to make and stick with really hard decisions.

The new generation of weight-loss drugs has the potential to help reduce prevalence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, two of the most prevalent chronic conditions. How might that affect hospital operations and capital and financial planning?

Hospitals face enormously complex operational challenges every day. The advanced analytics used by large commercial businesses can offer solutions that improve revenue, lower expenses, and enhance patient outcomes.

Health systems are faced with two conflicting realities. The first is that partnerships will continue to be a necessary and critical part of healthcare strategy. The second is that antitrust enforcement will continue to create strong barriers to these same partnerships.

For Medicaid plans that enjoyed a surge in business during the pandemic, this rapid decline in the market may be disheartening, and the large rapid shifts in the Medicaid risk pools will be challenging to manage to target profit margins in the near-term.

Rating meetings should include a meaningful discussion of notable achievements along with a frank, no-spin discussion of the risks the organization is facing. This balance will build credibility with the rating analyst and, ultimately, the rating committee.

Steward Health Care’s recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing is one of the largest health system bankruptcies in recent memory. Although Steward is a for-profit system, there are important lessons that not-for-profit health system leaders can learn from the Steward bankruptcy.

Walmart’s failure as a healthcare provider points to some big problems in U.S. healthcare, including a difficult business model, an unfriendly reimbursement model, and a basic healthcare expense-to-revenue problem.

The many forces driving some hospitals to financial distress make it impossible to maintain the status quo. Leaders can move beyond a binary close-or-don’t-close decision to reconsider what it means to deliver healthcare in communities that struggle to support a hospital.

With hundreds of competing priorities, hospital executive teams must focus on something they that they know they can spend time on and get real results from. An intense focus on improving length of stay gives hospitals a significant advantage in financial performance.

The moral issues coming at executives today are increasing exponentially in complexity, frequency, and intensity. Literature can help cultivate a practice of judicious thought that is as sophisticated as these issues demand.