Sg2 Blog

With the Strategy Accelerator program, efforts to strategically prioritize care at home programs for deployment take shape. Amid increasing inpatient lengths of stay; capacity limitations; and pressure from competitors, policy makers, payers and patients, the forces pointing to care at home as an opportunity continue to mount. However, success requires careful planning and analysis to craft a tail...

For some, value-based care (VBC) is just a trendy term that replaces other expressions that have come before it (eg, population health, accountable care, managed care). It often connotes a payer contracting strategy that involves some degree of risk sharing and quality reporting, but for those providers who fully embrace it, it’s much more. VBC is a vital part of addressing the challenges th...

Clinical and technological advances continuously reshape healthcare services and the workforce that delivers them. In a cycle of creative destruction, new roles emerge while some legacy positions are reconsidered. Multiple drivers will also impact workforce needs in coming decades. Examples include an older and more diverse population, environmental impacts that disproportionately affect vulnerabl...

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has seized the public consciousness, signaling a potential disruption that could be one of the most profound in generations. Large language models, such as ChatGPT, are advancing rapidly, demonstrating an uncanny ability to process natural language and write compellingly (if not always accurately) by predicting word sequences. As more AI tools become avai...

Just because healthcare organizations open their doors doesn’t mean that patients will show up. This was especially true during the pandemic as a pause on elective surgeries, lack of a transactional care and revenue led healthcare systems to struggle. Add to that inflation and the increase of nontraditional disruptors — whether tech, private equity or venture capital-backed firms or pa...

As part of Sg2’s value-based care (VBC) analysis and market research, we review the quarterly earnings calls from a subset of publicly traded legacy payers and VBC-focused entrants. The summary is designed to highlight emerging trends and dynamics in these closely related industries, especially as these tie to VBC. The following post draws from recently released earnings call transcripts fr...

We have been here before; some have succeeded, or at least gotten by, while many have failed. At what? Building an integrated model where the health system is both the provider and the payer. Lessons were learned, yet today’s economic uncertainty, rising costs and hospital financial performance coupled with major insurer reluctance to continue fee-for-service (FFS) rate increases have hospit...

Physician referral analytic tools have existed for decades to help health care organizations understand referral patterns, prioritize outreach efforts and monitor progress, and organizations have long considered physician outreach teams as tools to improve leakage and increase revenue. While both of these still hold true today, there is actually more to the story. Leakage from affiliated physician...

Health care providers in many markets have found themselves becoming a part of something larger than they originally signed up for. For hospitals and health systems to be sustainable during current workforce challenges and margin pressures, they are increasingly joining large networks to drive revenue. As a result, the health care industry is seeing record numbers of mergers and acquisitions, ofte...

How serious are health care systems about their consumer strategy? For decades, consumerism in health care has been a “nice to have” but not a “must have.” Health care as an industry didn’t value customer loyalty because they didn’t see those utilizing their services as customers, they saw them as patients—and patients require care. Thus, the health system...