Healthcare Financing Trends 2022

Do the trends of healthcare financing seem confusing and unstable? 

There are many factors to healthcare financing. So, guessing where the financing trends are headed gets a bit difficult. Many hospitals and medical practices are operating at a deficit, making it more apparent that medical financing is inconsistent. This makes getting care difficult for patients and operating a lot more work for anyone in the medical industry. 

With costs going up and insurance policies changing, the healthcare financing trends for 2022 are as follows.

Medical-cost Trend Rising Out-of-Pocket Expenses

The healthcare industry saw a large downward trend in profit margins throughout 2021. Over one-third of hospitals operated at a net loss of 54 billion dollars. This is 11% lower than before the pandemic, making the trend continue in a downward spiral. About 30% of medical practices reported they turned profitable in 2021. It was a tough year for many in the medical industry.

Medical costs are all over the place. As a result, many hospitals are looking into outsourcing vendors to drive down their operational costs. This is so they can try to operate at a profit and get out of the trend of losing money. By outsourcing vendors, they might be able to cut down on operating costs. And they can still offering great care, This creates a better experience for all involved. The goal is that in 2022, the hospitals will trend upwards towards balancing their costs.

With out-of-pocket expenses rising, many patients are having to pay more for the medical attention they need than before. This may seem like a win for healthcare providers, but it can cause more difficulties as well. It makes everything more difficult because it means that more patients will require financing and payment solutions. It makes it more difficult for people to pay and for your practice to get the money needed. This is because people take time to get loan approval or payment plans and you have wait to get your money. With out-of-pocket medical expenses going up as time passes, these trends will continue to be evident.

Why Revenue is Down

Revenue is also down right now because of the lasting effects of COVID-19. Since the pandemic shifted so many resources towards helping people who contracted the virus, there are fewer doctors available to assist in elective surgeries. Urgent surgeries are getting done. But elective surgeries are down as a whole. This is a problem because elective surgeries are what help drive revenue for hospitals. COVID-19 keeps people from getting unwanted procedures. So, there is a steady decline in the number of elected surgeries. It partially explains why there has been a steady decline in revenue as well.

This trend is not changing quickly as resources continue to shift towards COIVD-19 care. This is something to note as a trend in 2022 since it seems that this will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. Hospitals will need to compensate for this and either try to offer ways to get people in quicker for these surgeries or figure out how to make back the revenue in other ways.

How to Grow Revenue

By August of 2021, healthcare spending went up 7.2% compared to 2020. Hospital care, physician and clinical services, and ‘other health spending’ lead the healthcare spending categories from 2021 as well. For future trends, it seems that everything is trending upwards, meaning that a lot of the debt associated with the medical world right now will go away.

A great way to ensure this trend will happen is for hospitals to entice patients to go to them for the care needed. The pandemic made it difficult for patients to go see a doctor for normal procedures. So, they went to whichever hospital or doctor’s office would help them. This took revenue away from hospitals. And it became difficult for them to help their regular patients.

Hospitals should find a way to reach out to these patients and get them to use their services again. This way, they might be able to gain revenue again. If this is possible, then many hospitals have the potential to change their revenue curve in an upward direction.

Age Groups & Insurance

The 2021 trends saw that many people did not have insurance, especially among the younger age groups.

In every category of medical bills and debt, people from the age of 25-41 had debt problems and opted out of certain medical procedures in the last year. This is partially due to many people in this age group not having insurance to help cover procedures and medication.

This is part of the reason why medical practices and hospitals operated at a loss because people don’t have insurance coverage to pay for the procedures needed. This was largely due to insurance companies not being in place to help front/cover many of the medical costs that patients needed. This is becoming a more common issue in the medical world.

Then the market hits a grey area because people are going to need to finance procedures and medical practices need to make money to operate. While medical loans will front the money to the practice, it can take time and be difficult for patients to secure the financing needed. With multiple groups of people doing this, it becomes difficult for practices to run successfully and turn a profit. While this can cause issues, this is something that practices need to take note of and prepare for this year since the industry is trending in the direction of needing more financing. Practices can prepare for this by finding finance companies to partner with so they can offer to finance their patients when needed.

How Denefits Can Help the Trends

With healthcare Patient financing trends being all over the place for both patients and practice, Denefits can help get the money flowing again.

A big issue is that patients have is that they cannot pay for the procedures they might need and they need financing. The pandemic affected many people’s credit scores, making it difficult for them to get the financing they need. With Denefits, there are no credit checks and everyone gets approved! This is a tool that will help people get the care and will get the money in the healthcare industry flowing again.