While average length of stay has experienced a long-term decline, one component of average stay seems to be increasing – private rooms. The average stay in a private room increased nearly 10% based on an analysis of the 2016 Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data set. Even more…
Over 4,000 institutions participate in the Federal Work Study Program. This program provides funds for part-time employment to help needy students finance the costs of postsecondary education. For the fiscal year ending June, 2016, $1.16 billion was paid to students under this program. This was roughly the same as the…
Analysts in health care don’t agree in unanimity very often, but most seem to agree that there will continue to be a quantum shift in healthcare from inpatient to outpatient. In this two part series, we will attempt to quantify and support this important trend. We utilized the Beds and…
Last week, we observed that the PLUS loan program continues to escalate both in terms of dollars borrowed and in terms of recipients. Using the newly published Financial Aid Interactive, we projected the number of dollars borrowed by PLUS loan borrowers will increase 1.25 billion for the year ending June,…
Public Insight, an analytics platform that transforms public and licensed data into actionable insights, announces the launch of Hospital Interactives, the first self-service data analytics offering for the healthcare market. Hospital Interactives are a unique combination of blended, disparate health data and Microsoft® Power BI software to analyze vast quantities of…
One hospital is world-renowned and recognized for its expertise. It has over 3,000 physicians and 1,280 beds. About 145 miles down the road is a small, 25 bed hospital serving the needs of a county with an entire population of 32,000. One hospital has been a five-star hospital from the…
Many prognosticators are projecting a coming economic crisis caused by student debt. This is typically focused around an inability to pay off the principal of the loan. But it really appears that we are also setting ourselves up for a real problem with the cost of debt. Overall new…
Los Angeles County, CA and Cook County, IL (Chicago) have 117 CMS rated hospitals between them and over 15 million residents. Yet, there is not a single five-star hospital in either county. In this mini-series, we have examined the profile of the current 188 five-star hospitals as it marks its…
Nell Gluckman of The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an interesting piece about the challenges of public cutbacks in the state of Louisiana. The premise of the article is that there are trickle-down implications of state cutbacks in tuition, faculty morale, and curriculum. Louisiana has passed along substantial tuition increases to its…
Postsecondary institutions gave over $17 billion in financial aid in 2015. This represented a 3% increase from 2014. However, the number of student receiving the financial aid declined 3% so the average financial aid per student when looked at over the entire postsecondary landscape actually increased 6%. We used data…
It is hard to believe but it has been about one year since the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released its initial hospital rating system. At that time 102 hospitals earned the coveted five-star rating. The most recent ratings show 188 hospitals with the five-star rating out of roughly…
There have been many studies and articles that focus on the topic of risks and volume. For example, a U.S. News and World Report article cites mortality rates for hip replacement at three times the national average. Are the busiest hospitals the best for lowering risk? Using analysis from…