Reports and Studies
2022 Trends Shaping the Health Economy
2022
Data Story Highlights
- The share of commercially insured Americans, the lifeblood of the U.S. healthcare system, dropped 0.6 percentage points from 2020 to 2021.
- While there is geographic variation by CBSA, overall projected growth in demand is below industry expectations (2% compound annual growth rate) for all service lines between 2022 and 2026.
- Between 2019 and 2022, 9.8% of physicians (M.D. or D.O.) stopped practicing. When accounting for the number of new physicians entering the workforce during the same period, the report finds that the U.S. saw a net -2% reduction in the physician workforce.
- In 2021, antidepressant and antianxiety prescribing represented approximately 19% of seven selected drug classes analyzed, surpassing opioids (15.4%) in rank, which previously were prescribed at a higher rate.
- Among the largest health systems by volume, Cleveland Clinic has the highest patient loyalty (79.4%), closely followed by Sentara (74.8%) and NorthShore (73%).
A Note from our Chief Research Officer, Sanjula Jain, Ph.D.
As a health economist, I’ve been primed to study healthcare through the lens of demand, supply, and yield. Even though healthcare services deviate from what we economists call the ideal market, the core principles still offer a valuable framework for decision making.
In the second installment of our Trends Shaping the Health Economy series, we examine how the intersection of demand and supply informs the expected yield in terms of patients and, therefore, revenue. The cumulative impact of the 13 secular trends: every stakeholder from health systems to medical device companies will be impacted by reduced yield.
Armed with this report, I encourage you to think critically about what each trend means for your organization’s future, and ask yourself: How can you compete in an era of declining yield?
