How APCD Insights Can Empower Healthcare Growth Planners
By Charles Glover and Sean Conway
The trend toward outpatient healthcare is here to stay, and for several reasons revolving around cost savings. For starters, while outpatient facilities may vary in size and services offered, they are almost always less expensive to build than traditional hospitals. Second, without the need for extensive nursing units and housekeeping functions required within a hospital, they are more affordable to operate. Finally, staffing expenses are lower as offices are typically closed on nights and weekends.
There are other factors driving the increase in outpatient care, including:
- Changes in insurance reimbursement rules, and the adoption of site-neutral payments, are incentivizing providers to rethink their care delivery strategy.
- New technologies and better drugs have allowed medical tests, procedures, and therapies to be provided outside of acute care settings. (Rehab Insights)
- The easier access to care, along with the potential for lower out-of-pocket costs, has made outpatient care a popular choice for patients.
With all these pressures pushing the development of outpatient care, healthcare growth planners need solid strategies for tracking patient movement, leveraging trends in reimbursement, and addressing physician leakage. In this post, we’ll discuss which data is the right data for planners to use to access the critical information needed for informed outpatient planning.
