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Shrinkflation Hits Healthcare | Solace A Raise
September 5, 2024
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Together with
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“Take away all the bulls**t, everybody wants the best quality health care. If your name represents quality and safety, patients are going to come… It’s the brand that actually attracts the patients.”
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NYU Langone Health CEO Bob Grossman
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Shrinkflation is hitting healthcare, and patients aren’t too happy about longer waits for shorter visits.
NYC Health and Hospitals rocked the boat last week after telling its primary care physicians to slash appointment times in half to 20 minutes, so they could squeeze in more patients.
- The public health system is grappling with 50,000 new primary care patients since 2021, which caused wait times to double to an average of 22 days.
- It’s a rough situation, and the physicians are understandably worried that shorter appointments will only hurt care quality and contribute to even more burnout as NYC HH was already struggling to compete with its private counterparts for clinical staff.
Nearly 1 in 5 patients now have to wait over a month before seeing a physician, with 43% reporting longer waits since the pandemic.
- Rising patient volumes and pent-up demand were the stars of the show during health systems’ Q2 investor calls, but the supply of providers has struggled to keep up.
- Ramping up physician training and recruitment hasn’t put much of a dent in the issue, and desperate systems are turning to shrinkflation to (temporarily) balance the equation.
A vicious cycle gets created when the escalating needs of an aging population get answered with less care for individual patients. Worse care only causes demand to grow faster, which is why new solutions are needed to break the cycle.
- Sutter Health told Axios that it’s investing in scheduling and referral tools to speed up wait times and streamline administrative workflows. Sounds better than 20 min visits.
- Providence said that it’s been leaning in on capacity optimization software to identify scheduling gaps and ensure that its surgical suites are operating with limited downtime.
While not every health system has the same resources as Sutter or Providence, most could probably avoid some costly headaches by incorporating lessons from the success of their peers, like not trading short-term solutions – shrinkflation – for bigger problems down the road.
The Takeaway
Times are tough, but shrinkflation is a brittle crutch.
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Navigate the Future of Healthcare AI at Elevate
Join Medallion at Elevate on October 30th and experience the top minds in healthcare coming together to share bold ideas and connect in an informal, down-to-business setting. This was hands-down the best virtual conference we attended last year, and the lineup for 2024 is packed with execs from orgs like from VillageMD, Multiplan, and Community Health Systems. Take advantage of Elevate by registering here.
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- Cancer Patients Rely on Portals: New acronyms bring new research, and the ASTP/ONC just published a study showing that 65% of patients with a recent cancer diagnosis accessed their online medical records in 2020-2022, a big jump from 40% in 2018. Of those who were recently diagnosed, 40% accessed their records six or more times in the previous year (vs. 23% of those without cancer). Nearly all patients with a new cancer diagnosis accessed test results through a patient portal or online system, with about half needing to use multiple platforms.
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- Health Benefits of Weekend Sleep: Good news for those that used Labor Day Weekend for some well-deserved rest and relaxation: a study shared at ESC Congress 2024 showed that catching up on missed sleep can dramatically reduce heart disease risk. The analysis of 91k UK Biobank participants found that those with the most catch-up sleep following weekday deprivation were 19% less likely to develop heart disease over a 14 year follow-up period than those with the least weekend sleep.
- MUSC + SoundHound: MUSC Health is rolling out SoundHound’s AI agent to help patients take the self-service route for more of their care needs. The partnership arrives less than a month after SoundHound acquired Amelia AI for $80M, which included conversational AI tech and an all-important Epic integration to enable personalized healthcare responses. SoundHound went public via a SPAC merger back in 2021.
- Football’s Back: Although this is definitely more analog health than digital health, we’re celebrating the return of Thursday Night Football with research highlighting the safety benefits of the NFL’s swanky new Guardian Caps (this picture says it all). There’s been a 50% reduction in concussions among players who wore the Guardian Caps over two years of preseason practices, and the league reports that collision forces can be reduced by ~20% if both players wear them. We’ll see tonight how many players are cool enough to rock the optional safety accessory.
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