Each month, the Ascendient Research Team curates and analyzes the most pressing, most actionable healthcare research.

Meet the Team is our blog series introducing some of the amazing professionals at Ascendient – who they are and what makes them tick. This month, meet Greg Flicek, a senior manager who joined the team in May 2021. Public accounting, national consulting groups, higher education, in-house hospital management – you’ve practiced in a variety… Read More

Back in 2021, my wife and I were searching for our next home. The market seemed insane. Home prices were seemingly increasing every day and every offer we made encountered double-digit competition.  Our prospects seemed dim, and it felt like the risk of overpaying increased with every passing day. Contrary to rising prices, interest rates… Read More

Big changes are likely on the way for nonprofit health systems accustomed to “checking the boxes” in their community benefit reporting. Last month, two Democrat and two Republican senators wrote to the IRS questioning $28 billion in tax exemptions for nonprofit providers that “avoid providing essential care in the community for those who need it… Read More

As a healthcare finance consultant, people always ask me, “Are hospitals losing money?” or if they’re more pessimistically inclined, “Why are hospitals still losing money?” That may not make for great cocktail party conversation, but the questions are important, and the answers are … complicated. In an October blog post, we warned that 88% of… Read More

CMS wants to take better care of older Americans with multiple chronic conditions, but providers aren’t taking the billion-dollar bait. Nearly a decade after billing codes for Chronic Care Management (CCM) were first introduced, fewer than 10% of primary care providers are offering the most basic level of service. That’s bad for patients and for… Read More

Meet the Team is our blog series introducing some of the amazing professionals at Ascendient – who they are and what makes them tick. This month, meet Katie Reilley, a senior managing consultant who joined the team in May 2021. You studied neuroscience as an undergrad before going back to Johns Hopkins for a Master… Read More

If you work in public health, you’ve surely experienced the burnout trend firsthand. Experts say state and local health departments have lost 15% of essential staff over the past decade, and 80,000 full-time workers are needed immediately just to provide “a minimum package of public health services.” From analysts to epidemiologists, public health professionals have… Read More

Based on survey data, the future of public health is looking pretty grim. According to a March 2023 study in Health Affairs, local health departments could lose more than half their workforce by 2025. What’s worse, after a 17% decline prior to the Covid pandemic, health departments already fall 80,000 workers short of the staffing levels needed to… Read More

Similar to other use cases, AI tools represent a supplemental resource when performing CON tasks, but are (for now) no substitute for personal experience and human intelligence Stories about generative AI technology have proliferated in newsfeeds and publications since the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, the latest chatbot from San Francisco-based technology company OpenAI. Users… Read More