Blog

  • What the Ascension – Presence Merger Reveals

    This week, Ascension Health acquired Presence Health, combining the largest Catholic-sponsored healthcare system in Illinois with the nation’s largest Catholic health system, the companies announced Tuesday. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals. The deal underscores a continued trend towards market consolidation.    It seems Ascension, at 141 hospitals, acquiring an…

  • More Students Paying Out-of-State Tuition Rates

    Over 230,000 students pay out-of-state tuition rates compared to approximately 1.5 million students who pay in-state or in-district rates according to the most recent cohort group from IPEDS. This represents 13.09% of the students and continues an upward progression of out-of-state paying students.    The number of students paying out-of-state…

  • Private Room Average Hospital Stays up 10%

    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…

  • Is the Federal Work Study Program Working?

    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…

  • Inpatient vs. Outpatient – What the Numbers Show

    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…

  • The Debt Service Cost of PLUS Loans

    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 Launches Self-Service Health Data Analytics

    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…

  • Students Increasingly Opting for High Cost Debt

    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…

  • Rural Hospitals are Five-Star According to CMS

    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…

  • Top Ten States with Growing Tuition Costs

    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…

  • Student Financial Aid up 6.2%

    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…