Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Drive Growth and Provide Quality Care to the Right Patients

By Sara Handa

Hospitals have long used service line development to provide easily accessible, quality care to well-defined patient populations. While vital to growth, these development efforts can be risky and often require significant time and financial investment. In order to minimize risk and expand your service offerings more effectively, hospitals need reliable, data-based intelligence to guide their efforts.

In this post, we consider four ways to identify pockets of unmet demand and consider how to add new facilities in these areas that will ultimately grow your market share and meet patient needs. We’ll highlight some common mistakes providers often make and discuss how to get a more detailed understanding of your patient population so you can focus on the right service line growth opportunities.

Recently, we performed an analysis for a customer on cardiac services trends.  Based on previous studies, we knew cardiac inpatient services were declining overall.  However, we discovered that inside cardiac services many of the sub-service lines behave quite differently; many declining but some actually increasing.  We analyzed all-payer data from Florida, Texas and California alongside full U.S. Medicare data and discovered a deeper understanding than “inpatient cardiac services are declining.”