Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Financial Rx for health facilities
Healthcare | North America
May 3, 2024 – Academic medical centers play a crucial role in treating complex patient populations in an educational setting, but many of these facilities also encounter financial challenges, including inflation and reimbursement rates that don’t keep pace with costs, according to senior partners Edward Levine and Rupal Malani and colleagues. In a recent McKinsey survey, two-thirds of US academic medical center leaders indicate that physician productivity and length of patient stay are the areas with the greatest potential for margin improvement.
To read the article, see “Ensuring the financial sustainability of academic medical centers,” April 4, 2024.
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Visual form
Bar chart.
Layout / body structure
The page uses a single ranked vertical bar chart with one highlighted bar on the left and a descending sequence of smaller bars to the right. The reading order moves from the tallest bar across the remaining margin-improvement areas in descending order.
What is being compared
It compares performance areas that respondents to the academic medical center survey identify as the biggest untapped margin-improvement opportunities.
Measurement system
The measure is percentage of respondents ranking each area in their top two. The bars are labeled directly with their values, and the category names sit above the bars in a descending order from most cited to least cited.
Visible structure inside the graphic
One bright highlighted bar for length of stay dominates the left edge of the chart. A series of darker bars for physician productivity, premium pay optimization, operating room utilization, and additional operational levers continues to the right.
Main takeaway from the visual
The chart shows that length of stay stands apart from the rest of the field as the most widely cited untapped margin opportunity, while the remaining levers are more fragmented across operational and productivity topics.
Key standout values or extremes
Length of stay leads at 41 percent, well ahead of physician productivity at 22 percent. The next group falls into the teens, with premium pay optimization at 16 percent and other categories stepping down from there into single digits.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a static chart image with no in-chart controls to operate.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart image is the full visual on this page.