The following is an excerpt from our recent piece in Healthcare Dive:
In today’s healthcare environment, hospitals large and small are steadily shifting their focus from serving as a primarily inpatient site of care to investing in robust outpatient capabilities and reducing inpatient lengths of stay whenever possible. This shift is driven, in part, by the need to maximize value-based payments, streamline costs, and deliver care in the least intensive setting possible.
As a result, patients who do require inpatient care are more likely to have highly complex and acute needs — where rapid access to specialized care such as emergent stroke care or psychiatric care is even more critical.
Recent analysis from the American Hospital Association reports an increase in inpatient acuity of 3 percent from 2019 to 2024 and forecasts additional increases in inpatient acuity over the next decade, with a corresponding 3 percent increase in inpatient utilization and 9 percent increase in inpatient days.
The primary driver of increasing acuity and length-of-stay is chronic disease requiring complex care and tertiary services. Additionally, the incidence of chronic disease is only growing. A near doubling of the number of Americans over age 50 with at least one chronic disease by 2050 is predicted, as is a more than 91 percent increase in the number of older Americans with more than one chronic disease. Hospitals that don’t adapt to the rapidly changing patient mix will be left behind, and the financial difficulties that result will only worsen.
