Sg2 Blog

  Diane Maas is the chief strategy and digital transformation officer of Beacon Health System, based in South Bend, Indiana. Q: Let’s start by learning more about you—what’s your background and what brought you to your current role at Beacon Health? I wrote my thesis in college on the HMO industry, which led to my first job in health care, working for Blue Cross Blue Shi...

Virtua Health is a five-hospital system with more than 350 locations in southern New Jersey, including 40+ ambulatory surgery centers, seven emergency departments, and seven urgent care centers, as well as telehealth options; its specialties include orthopedics and advanced surgery. The system aimed to optimize its digestive disease services after acquiring several gastroenterology groups and Lour...

St. Luke’s Hospital, a nonprofit health system in the greater St. Louis area, consists of two hospitals with 636 beds, two ambulatory surgery centers, eight urgent care facilities, nearly 200 employed physicians, and a medical staff of over 1,000 physicians across 60 specialties. Post-pandemic, the hospital faced challenges due to the lack of a formalized strategic plan and wanted to refine ...

Increasing demand is making it difficult for provider systems’ cardiovascular service lines to maintain access for patients across the care continuum. Growth is fueled not only by the aging of the population but also a concerning rise in disease onset and acute events in patients younger than 45. Here at the start of 2025, a couple of areas have bubbled to the top of systems’ CV priori...

I had just finished giving a presentation to a room of hospital CEOs on the current AI landscape when one of the executives raised her hand. “Is AI really going to be a thing in health care? We’ve spent over a decade installing EHRs in our system and all they have done is increased cost and burnout. And with cybersecurity threats, I feel AI is only going to make things worse,” she said. I responde...

Editor's note: Tammy Tiller-Hewitt, FACHE, CEO, Tiller-Hewitt HealthCare Strategies, contributed to this post. Imagine being able to report that you discovered an opportunity to generate $26 million on average in year-one incremental net revenue. This kind of opportunity comes from high-value referrals based on your health system's current facility footprint and service lines. You can tap into y...

Many health care delivery organizations believe fee-for-service (FFS) and value-based care (VBC) economic models are at odds with each other. Many analogies highlight this divergence—with perhaps the most popular being the illustration of an individual with one foot grounded on the dock and the other foot on a boat slowly pulling away. While this visual is powerful, it overstates the necess...

The rules of engagement with health systems are changing—and industry partners clinging to the old playbook risk being left behind. At Sg2's 2025 Executive Summit, a clear message emerged: assumptions that once guided strategy are not just outdated—they’re obstructive. Financial recovery doesn’t mean business as usual, and hospitals shouldn't be the center of care anymore. ...

As part of Sg2’s value-based care (VBC) analysis and market research, we review the quarterly earnings calls from a subset of publicly traded legacy payers and VBC-focused entrants. The summary is designed to highlight emerging trends and dynamics in these closely related industries, especially as they tie to VBC. The following post draws from recently released earnings call transcripts fro...

Eric Spann, MD, is a family medicine physician at Baxter Health, based in Mountain View, Arkansas. Q: Dr. Spann, how do you envision AI impacting your day-to-day work, your patient interactions and what defines good medicine? A: If we thought that addressing “Dr. Google” was a big part of our daily work, this is going to be Dr. Google on steroids. Patients are now going to have a large...