Sg2 Blog

Brain tumor care is a highly specialized area that spans the cancer and neurosciences service lines. Sg2’s 2024 Impact of Change forecast projects modest growth for brain/central nervous system (CNS) tumor services over the decade: 1% for inpatient, 13% outpatient. Provider systems confront a highly competitive landscape for these low-volume, high-margin services. To capture the opportunity ...

Partnerships, now more than ever, are critical to health system growth and performance. These alliances exist in a middle ground between loose relationships and outright acquisitions. To achieve their full potential, they cannot be merely opportunistic but firmly grounded in strategy. That strategic focus is chief among the short list of priorities academic systems’ leaders now pursue in the...

Children’s hospital leaders have a full plate in 2025—managing the challenges and opportunities presented by innovative therapeutics, emerging technologies and artificial intelligence, policy uncertainties, regionalization and subspecialty shortages—the list goes on and on. To help you focus and cut through the noise, Sg2 experts have identified four top priority strategic action...

Increasing demand is making it difficult for provider systems’ cardiovascular service lines to maintain access for patients across the care continuum. Growth is fueled not only by the aging of the population but also a concerning rise in disease onset and acute events in patients younger than 45. Here at the start of 2025, a couple of areas have bubbled to the top of systems’ CV priori...

Eric Spann, MD, is a family medicine physician at Baxter Health, based in Mountain View, Arkansas. Q: Dr. Spann, how do you envision AI impacting your day-to-day work, your patient interactions and what defines good medicine? A: If we thought that addressing “Dr. Google” was a big part of our daily work, this is going to be Dr. Google on steroids. Patients are now going to have a large...

Hospital system chief financial officers (CFOs) face an increasingly complex financial landscape, one shaped by regulatory shifts, technological advancements and evolving patient expectations. Here are 3 top takeaways to effectively navigate in 2025. ► Pharmacy Optimization: With systems reporting 25% of revenue tied to pharmacy operations, this area represents a significant revenue opportunity fo...

For most health systems, the post-COVID survivor mode has ended. Systems have reached some level of cost structure and workforce stability, and they can turn their attention once again to strategic investments and growth. But that doesn’t mean the coming years will be without challenges. Top of mind for many is ambulatory growth and access, capacity management, new revenue generation, and s...

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, we’ve been busy discussing with health care stakeholders how to best plan for and use AI across their organizations, from supporting clinical decision-making to reducing administrative burdens. What I didn’t plan for was having nearly half of these discussions focus on supply chain. But perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise—wh...

Health care organizations have turned the corner on pandemic recovery and are now strongly focused on strategy and investment. Day-to-day operations have stabilized for most. But the industry’s competitive landscape has irrevocably shifted, and the performance gap between the best and worst has widened. Health systems must chart this new territory with less capital, which makes strategy&mdas...

I've started labeling cybersecurity as the "Achilles' heel" of digital health. Across meetings, workshops, and events, Sg2 experts have touted the opportunities that telehealth, AI, and other digital technologies can bring to health care, but cybersecurity risk always pumps the breaks on those discussions. It's the looming dark cloud. The elephant in the room. A digital skeptic's favorite topic to...