Hospital Services
A Structured Look at Your Options Before You Cut.
Payment designation, cost structure, revenue cycle, service mix and partnerships, tested in order, from the least disruptive option to the most.
Questions this work helps answer
- What is driving our losses, and what are the options short of cutting services?
- Would a different designation, such as Critical Access Hospital or Rural Emergency Hospital, change our economics?
- Could shared services or an affiliation fill our gaps without costing us local control?
- How much patient outmigration are we seeing, and how much of it could we recapture?
- What would a service change mean for access, workforce and approvals?
What we typically look at
- Cost report accuracy and payment designation
- Staffing against volume, vacancy and premium labor
- Revenue cycle indicators and cash conversion
- Service mix, swing beds and outpatient options
- Partnership, affiliation and shared-service options, and state approval requirements
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.
Rural hospital sustainability
- Five Questions Rural Hospital Leaders Should Answer Before Cutting Services
- How Rural Hospitals Can Investigate Financial Stabilization Opportunities
- What to Evaluate Before Restructuring a Rural Hospital
- How Shared Services May Affect Rural Hospital Operating Models
- How Patient Outmigration Can Affect Rural Hospital Sustainability
- How to Evaluate the Financial and Strategic Implications of Service Changes
- How to Build a Structured Hospital Stabilization Assessment
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.
Do you recommend a particular outcome?
No. We compare the options on the same financial, access and workforce criteria so that leadership and the board can decide, and we state where the evidence is thin.
Talk to us about rural hospital stabilization assessment
Tell us what you are trying to understand or decide, and we will tell you how we would approach it.