Welcome to Gist Insights, where we share our thinking on healthcare trends and key issues facing the industry, and provide actionable guidance for CEOs and senior executives.
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Featured Insight
Preparing for generations of Medicare growth
by Gist Healthcare, Sep 24, 2021
The healthcare industry is now at the peak of the long-awaited transition of the Baby Boom generation into Medicare. The “greying” of the Boomers will…
National ASC chains look to dominate growing market
As care continues to shift to lower cost ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), the graphic below looks at recent growth and consolidation in the ASC market. From 2012 to 2022, the five largest…
As inflation ameliorates, healthcare returns as top financial concern
With the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) report revealing the 12-month inflation rate in April 2023 rose again after hitting a recent low in March, we’re using this…
A new normal for hospital margins?
Using data from Kaufman Hall’s National Hospital Flash Report, as well as publicly available investor reports for some of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems, the graphic below takes stock of the…
UnitedHealth Group hits a milestone in vertical integration
Constrained by the Affordable Care Act’s medical loss ratio (MLR) requirement that health insurers must spend 80-85 percent of their revenue on medical services, payers have been pivoting to providing care, managing pharmacy…
The concerning rise in colorectal cancer
A new study from the American Cancer Society revealed a startling phenomenon in colorectal cancer: cases are trending younger while the severity of diagnoses is increasing. As shown in the graphic below, despite…
Which physician specialties are most targeted for corporate roll-ups?
In the last edition of the Weekly Gist, we illustrated how non-hospital physician employment spiked during the pandemic. Diving deeper into the same report from consulting firm Avalere Health and the nonprofit Physicians Advocacy…
Non-hospital physician employment rose sharply during pandemic
While hospitals, payers, and private equity firms have long been competing to acquire independent physician groups, the COVID pandemic spurred a marked acceleration of the physician employment trend, with non-hospital corporate entities…
Payers racing to expand their provider footprints
In last week’s graphic, we showed how the nation’s largest health insurance companies earn annual revenues several times greater than the largest health systems. In the graphic below, we unpack the…
A battle of (growing) titans in healthcare
We’ve updated our annual comparison of the relative size of the largest healthcare companies, with the graphic below comparing 2022 revenues to 2019 for a sense of how different companies and industry…
