Fact File

The Truven Health 15 Top Health Systems® in the United States outperform their peers by demonstrating balanced excellence—operating effectively across all functional areas of their organizations. Investigating the winner and nonwinner data from this study is a useful way to see how the nation’s health and the industry's bottom lines could be improved. For apples-to-apples comparisons, the 15 Top Health Systems were placed into size categories by total operating expense: large (>$1.5 billion),medium ($750 million–$1.5 billion), and small (<$750 million).

Truven Health Analytics research shows that physician productivity among those in Generation X (ages 34–49 in 2014) and the Millennial Generation (ages 18–33) is significantly less than the average productivity of retiring Baby Boomer physicians (ages 50–68). Replacing a Baby Boomer internist will require 1.6 younger physicians, while replacing a Baby Boomer pediatrician will require 2.0 younger physicians. Physician demand planning calls for staffing based on productivity, and organizations can’t assume that productivity will be the same from one physician to another. For this study, six markets that have different characteristics were selected from across the United States, including a range of city populations: San Francisco (825,863) and Sacramento (457,516) in California, which has highly managed payer and provider systems; Boston (636,479) in Massachusetts, where the legislature approved PPACA-like programs in 2006; Austin (842,592) and San Antonio (1,382,951) in Texas, which chose to not implement Medicaid expansion under PPACA; and Chicago (2,714,856) in Illinois, which chose to implement Medi-caid expansion under PPACA.

The Truven Health Analytics™ 100 Top Hospitals® outperform their peers by demonstrating balanced excellence—operating effectively across all functional areas of their organizations. The data demonstrates how both patients' health and hospitals' bottom lines could be improved. Based on comparisons between the study winners and a peer group of similar high-volume hospitals that were not winners, the study found that if all hospitals performed at the level of this year's winners, nearly 165,000 additional lives could be saved, more than 90,000 additional patients could be complication-free, $5.4 billion could be saved, and the typical patient could be released from the hospital half a day sooner.