Higher outpatient service demand has caused Charleston, N.C.-area hospitals to adjust their strategies, The Post and Courier reports.
What you should know:
1. Roper St. Francis — the only private nonprofit health system in the Charleston area — was the only local hospital with declining inpatient numbers from 2012 to 2016.
The lower inpatient numbers echo a Moody's report projecting stagnant or decreasing inpatient admissions for nonprofit medical centers in 2019.
2. Roper's decrease in inpatient numbers is intentional, Roper St. Francis Chief Physician Officer Todd Shuman, MD, told The Post and Courier. The system has transferred maternal care and total joint procedures to locations closer to where patients live.
"There's this incredible shift as technology has improved from what used to be done," he said. "You would hospitalize people for four or five days. Now they're not hospitalized at all."
3. Charleston-based Medical University of South Carolina sees nearly 30,000 inpatients a year, but like other systems, it's targeting the outpatient space by developing an outpatient center in a vacant department store.
4. Despite inpatient growth, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare's East Cooper Medical Center in Mount Pleasant, S.C., is also looking to accommodate shifting demand for services.
"There is certainly a national trend, and it's just going to accelerate, where a lot of work that is being done now in the hospital is going to move into the outpatient setting," said Patrick Downes, East Cooper Medical Center CEO. "It's a trend that we as hospital administrators need to be focused on.”
5. On average, South Carolina hospitals charged 50 percent more per patient in 2017 than they did in 2010. Outpatient procedures tend to be less expensive.
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