Sg2 Blog

Nearly 16 years ago, I made the fortuitous choice to join a small but mighty team of health care change agents at a company called Sg2. In a conference room in Skokie, IL, Sg2’s founder, the late Michael Sachs, addressed a team of about 20 new hires (representing about 20 percent of the rapidly growing company) with what I came to understand was his everyday passion: health care and our need...

Sg2, a Vizient company, is pleased to announce the addition of Laura P Jacobs as a Senior Advisor in its consulting practice for value-based care. “Laura is one of the greatest minds in health care with an innate ability to see challenges clearly and successfully drive change,” says Sg2 senior consulting principal Tawnya Bosko, PhD, DHA. “I have had the privilege of having her a...

Note: Vizient's David Levine, MD, FACEP, Group Senior Vice President, Advanced Analytics and Product Management and Simrit Sandhu, Executive Vice President, Strategic Transformation and Clinical-Supply Solutions also contributed to this report. Health system leaders have faced unprecedented challenges over the past three years. The pandemic caused a sharp decline in inpatient volumes and a tempor...

Each year Sg2 debuts the latest enrollment projections from our five-year Insurance Coverage Estimates (ICE) demand forecast. The team considers ZIP code level, age, federal poverty level, ethnicity and gender data to meaningfully distribute the population across financial groups. The following national trends were key inputs to the 2023 ICE model. Note: Numbers may not add due to rounding. Sourc...

Our opinions, beliefs and values influence our choice of words and phrases. However, we are not always conscious of the reverse — that our choice of language can influence our opinions, beliefs, and values. This is a highly overlooked factor in humans’ adaptability to change. When we use terms that have a significant and emotional meaning in one context to another, we bring that contex...

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 they tie to VBC. The following post draws from recently released earnings call transcripts fro...

Many health systems have intentionally delayed taking downside risk in payment contracting for many reasons. In some cases, organizations aren't ready to perform in these contracts. In too many cases, there's a detrimental level of risk aversion that's impeding health systems from margin growth, particularly in value-based care (VBC) arrangements. Health systems and provider organizations that suc...

Many health systems have explored direct-to-employer opportunities at some level in recent years, but there needs to be more traction to show for these efforts. It is no secret that employer-funded commercial health insurance has provided the financial margin for providers, payers, benefits advisers and others in the ecosystem. Despite offerings from new entrants and incumbents designed to help em...

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Sg2’s parent company Vizient Inc’s blog. For most of 2020, COVID-19 disrupted and significantly altered the infrastructure of the world’s industries, including health care delivery and services. But at what level can we expect health care to return to pre-pandemic levels? What are the long-term effects of the pandemic ev...

Editor’s note: this post was originally published on Sg2’s parent company Vizient Inc’s blog. Frustrated with high costs, a growing number of self-insured companies are considering going in a different direction: contracting directly with high-performing health systems for their employees’ specialty care. Aiming for healthier, more productive employees and lower costs, ind...