Hospital Services
Decide Which Services to Grow, Fix or Rethink.
Demand, capacity and contribution compared together, using public market data alongside your own numbers.
Questions this work helps answer
- Should we expand, restructure or stop this service?
- Where do our market’s patients go for care, and could we recapture any of it?
- Do referral patterns support the service we are considering?
- Is a profitable-looking hospital hiding service lines that lose money?
- What can public hospital data tell us, and what can it not?
What we typically look at
- Public discharge data, such as AHRQ’s HCUP and, in New York, the SPARCS public use files
- Hospital service areas and referral regions as market definitions
- Your own volume, payer mix, capacity and contribution by service line
- Referral relationships and access, including appointment waits
- Scenarios for volume, payer mix and step-fixed costs
How it works
- Understand. We start with the decision you are facing and the questions behind it.
- Gather. We bring together the relevant data, documents and public information.
- Analyze and investigate. We look for patterns, problems, opportunities and likely causes, and we say what the evidence does and does not establish.
- Evaluate. We compare options and scenarios, including their trade-offs.
- Recommend. We translate the findings into clear priorities and next steps.
What you receive
A written summary of what we found, the evidence behind each finding and prioritized recommendations. Depending on what you need, we can also provide models, dashboards, presentations or implementation plans.
Guides to read first
These plain-language guides from our Blogs explain the questions behind this work, with their sources.
Service-line strategy
- How Hospitals Should Evaluate Whether to Expand a Service Line
- When an Underperforming Service May Warrant Restructuring Instead of Closure
- How to Investigate Underutilized Hospital Equipment
- What Leaders Should Know Before Investing in a New Clinical Service
- How Referral Patterns Can Influence Service-Line Strategy
- How to Compare Service-Line Demand, Capacity, and Financial Contribution
- Why Hospital-Wide Profitability Can Hide Service-Line Problems
Market intelligence
- What SPARCS Data Can Reveal About New York Hospital Markets
- How to Investigate Patient Outmigration
- How Hospitals Can Evaluate Service Demand in Their Markets
- How to Compare Hospital Utilization Patterns
- How to Identify Potential Market Opportunities From Public Healthcare Data
- What Public Hospital Data Cannot Tell You About Profitability
- How to Combine Market Data With Financial and Operational Evidence
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take and what does it cost?
It depends on the scope and the data available. After a first conversation we describe the approach and agree what is in scope before any work begins.
Do you need patient information?
Reviews like this generally work from aggregate financial, operational and public data. If a question would require patient-level data, we would discuss how to handle it before anything is shared.
Can public data show whether a service is profitable?
Not by itself. Charges are not revenue, and most public datasets carry no reliable cost information. We use public data for demand and market questions and your own data for profitability. Our guide on this topic explains why.
Talk to us about hospital service-line and market analysis
Tell us what you are trying to understand or decide, and we will tell you how we would approach it.