Union Healthcare Insight, a leading strategic insight firm, has announced the Future of Margins Initiative, a comprehensive national scenario planning model and strategic research suite, built for health system executives facing unprecedented changes to healthcare demand and cost structures.
Health system operating margins face relentless pressure in the years ahead. While most systems have experience modelling traditional financial pressures, like unfavourable cost and reimbursement trends, few have trustworthy insight to plan for market forces with less historical precedent. Alongside already challenged economics, health systems must plan for:
- Unprecedented utilisation shifts by ageing populations
- Increasing use of AI by health plans
- Structural changes to the healthcare workforce
- Rapid GLP-1 adoption
- Novel digital consumer options for care
Without reliable inputs and adaptable modeling, finance and planning teams risk developing under-informed strategic plans and budgets for the future.
Union’s Future of Margins Initiative is a comprehensive research and forecasting programme designed to model and anticipate these impacts. Rather than producing a single forecast, it lets health system leaders test their existing forecast against a range of plausible futures and toggle variables based on local conditions. A sensitivity analysis also lets leaders see how specific changes could impact their performance. Built as a feature of Union’s research membership, the programme also lets health systems compare results through benchmarking and peer organisation networking and access actionable research into strategies to achieve sustainable margins.
“Every health system leader has a budget for next year and a strategy for the next five, but too few have a good way to connect the two, or a way to see how all the forces impacting their enterprise interact and change over time,” said Christopher Kerns, CEO of Union Healthcare Insight. “Our job is to give leaders an objective and comprehensive view of what lies ahead, including the parts that are uncomfortable. The Future of Margins model is built so they can plan for the futures that are actually plausible instead of betting on one forecast – and then plot a realistic path forward.”
