For every health system finance professional who suspected that seasonality had some impact on net revenue but didn’t know how much, you were correct, and the effect is material. Finance teams cite various subjective reasons for fluctuations in net revenue and revenue cycle performance – for example, end-of-calendar-year benefit enrollment, summer physician specialty conferences, severity of flu seasons, number of Medicare payments in the month – as they attempt to explain what happened (positive or negative) to net revenue in the previous month. Crowe has studied net revenue patterns from more than 1,000 hospitals and has determined some trends that health systems may prepare for proactively.
