While some large health systems continue to expand, the typical U.S. health system remains modest in size.
The median health system has two hospitals, 550 beds, 17,500 annual discharges and $700 million in net patient revenue, according to a snapshot from Kaufman Hall, which analyzed 2022 data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to arrive at the averages.
Kaufman Hall is the group behind monthly "National Hospital Flash Report," which pins down hospitals' median operating margins by month along with other operational benchmarks based on data from more than 1,300 hospitals. In July, the most recent data available, the median year-to-date operating margin was 4.1%.
While large health systems may command attention in the U.S. healthcare landscape, the firm points out that the median health system is more similar to smaller systems than to their larger counterparts. In 2022, more than one-third of all health systems reported a net patient revenue of less than $500 million, while fewer than 8% of health systems surpassed $5 billion in net patient revenue.
Kaufman Hall’s infographic on the average health system can be found here.