By Laura Carson, Chief Marketing Officer, Verato
As health system leaders plan for 2027, cutting costs alone is no longer enough. Growth depends on reaching and retaining patients across a growing network of care and settings and recognizing them wherever they engage.
Becker’s Hospital Review laid it out this week. Banner Health CFO Staci Dickerson said, “We know we can’t just cut our way to financial sustainability.” Andre Boyd, CEO of Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, said, “You can’t cut your way to success, regardless of the payment model or HR 1. You still have to grow.” Jeremiah Hodshire, who runs the 110-bed Hillsdale Hospital in Michigan, put it simply: “We’ve already cut to the bone.”
Cost cutting alone is not a growth strategy
Becker’s analyzed 31 workforce reductions announced from July through mid-October. Twelve involved only leadership, administrative, IT, or other support roles. Wellstar cut 761 positions, about 2% of its workforce, in corporate and shared services. CommonSpirit is folding five regions into three and targeting central overhead of 14.5% of operating revenue, down from 15.8%.
These reductions show the continuing pressure to control costs. At the same time, health systems are seeking growth through new care settings, partnerships, and stronger patient relationships.
Growth is moving outside the hospital
The money is following patients into outpatient settings. CMS added 560 procedures to the ambulatory surgery center (ASC) covered list for 2026 and plans to add another 618 next year. The bets are large:
- Ascension completed its $3.9 billion acquisition of AmSurg, growing to about 300 ASCs.
- Bon Secours Mercy Health plans a $5.7 billion deal for Surgery Partners, which would add more than 200 ASCs.
- Penn Medicine, Independence Blue Cross, and Regent Surgical will build at least 18 new ASCs through a company all three will own.
- Sutter Health has hired more than 2,500 physicians and clinicians in three years to build out urgent care and ambulatory clinics.
Sutter CEO Warner Thomas says insurers notice:
“Insurers like what we’re doing … [because we’re] driving the cost of care down, we’re keeping people out of the ER, and continuing to move people from the inpatient to the outpatient environment.”
Warner Thomas, CEO, Sutter Health
Every one of these moves multiplies the places a patient can touch a health system. More front doors mean more records created in more systems.
The people you serve are changing faster than your records
Growth used to mean adding volume. Now it means maintainingmeans maintaining relationships with people as their care settings, contact information, and insurance coverage change.
The Commonwealth Fund found that 11.2% of adults ages 19 to 64 were uninsured this summer, up from 8.9% in 2024. Beginning in 2027, HR 1 requires many Medicaid expansion adults to document work or other qualifying activities and recheck eligibility every six months. A patient can be covered in spring, uninsured by fall, and back on a plan by winter.
Each change alters who that patient is to your system: payer, outreach eligibility, financial assistance, and the right next conversation. Your records need to follow the person through all of it. If they don’t, you lose the patient you already had.
Growth is harder than it sounds
Patients shop. They compare price and access, and they leave when a system is hard to deal with. The AHA reports that about 90% of consumers who switched said exactly that about the organization they left. McKinsey finds that about 70% of executives expect the digital front door to have the highest investment impact.
Patients also expect to be known. They don’t want to re-enter their history at a new surgery center, and they don’t want three versions of the same reminder.
Most health systems can’t deliver that yet. The clinical record sits in the EMR. Marketing and consumer data live in a CRM or a data platform. Nobody can say with confidence that a record in one place and a record in another belong to the same person. The journey is invisible, so the next step is a guess.
We talk with health system leaders every week. Ambition is rarely the sticking point. They know where they want to grow. They can’t see who they’re growing with.
Where growth breaks
Every growth bet above runs through identity:
- A new ASC opens. The patients who should be routed there live in your EMR. If they aren’t matched to your consumer data, you can’t find them.
- A campaign goes out. Duplicates inflate the audience and send the same person two messages. Missed matches mean a loyal patient gets the welcome offer meant for a stranger.
- Coverage changes. The patient moves from commercial to Medicaid to self-pay. Without one identity across systems, each team sees a different person.
- A payer partnership forms. Joint ventures and shared risk need a shared view of who the members are. Two organizations rarely hold the same record the same way.
Duplicates are also a quiet cost. One health system we work with, a leading integrated health system in the Northeast, improved the match between its Epic® patients and its marketing records by 31%. The health system also identified more than 50,000 additional duplicates and saved a day on every campaign. That’s the difference between marketing to a list and marketing to people.
What we do about it
Verato connects EMR data with marketing and consumer data around the right individual. We do it with patented Verato Referential Matching®, which resolves identity against a curated national reference instead of guessing from the records alone. In peer-reviewed research, Verato Referential Matching® delivered 98% accuracy out of the box, 24% better than probabilistic matching, for 75% of the U.S. population (JAMIA, 2022, DOI 10.1093/jamia/ocac068).
Your teams can then see the whole consumer: clinical history, marketing engagement, and enrichment such as demographics and social determinants of health. Marketing stops sending duplicate outreach. Access teams recognize a returning patient on the first call. Strategy teams can see which communities they serve and which they are missing.
The systems that grow over the next few years will be the ones that understand who their consumers are and what they need next.