Five Forces to Define Patient Flow in 2026
By Matt Phillion
Hospital operations, throughput, and capacity are top of mind for many organizations looking at the coming year and what needs to be done to help treat patients more effectively in the face of increased patient need and ever-shrinking resources and personnel. Where should healthcare organizations turn their attention to make the most of the tools they have to improve patient care in 2026 and beyond?
- Throughput tops the list of priorities
Throughput will be the number one financial key performance indicator (KPI) for hospitals in the coming year, says Russell Graney, co-founder and CEO of Aidin.
“Ever since COVID, capacity management has been a focus. The pandemic really exacerbated the fact that we don’t have enough beds for everybody, even when we’re not in the midst of a pandemic,” says Graney. “For years it’s been an effort to get back to normal, and post-pandemic we’ve seen a surge in capacity delays as really sick folks who were previously delayed care are now seeking out that care. We’re finally at the point where we’ve reached status quo, but even as we’ve leveled off, we’re nowhere what we need to serve the demands of the community.”
The industry simply can’t build beds fast enough and certainly can’t staff them all even if they could, he notes.
“Throughput is the fastest way to generate more capacity,” says Graney. “What I’m seeing is senior executives starting to realize that what used to feel like nitty-gritty operational work is actually central to their guarantee to patients: There’s a safe place for them to be in the hospital. When flow breaks down, patients end up waiting in hallways or emergency departments instead.”
But how do we generate more capacity with so many patients knocking on the door?
“The challenge is always the same,” he says. “We’re either optimizing staff or services or outside partnership. We’re constantly managing supply and demand. But the opportunity on all those fronts is finding ways to leverage what we have. And how can we get more out of the staff we have with the right technology?” he says.
- System-level redesign of patient flow
There were a lot of factors pulling everyone in healthcare in different directions for the past decade, but care management was a term that felt most urgent and close, Graney explains.
“We’re now responsible for what happens after the patient leaves our four walls. At first that was a level of responsibility perhaps we didn’t feel ready for, but after a decade, we’ve got new programs that place a burden on hospitals or health systems to coordinate what’s going on beyond patient discharge,” says Graney. “It’s been a slow boil but there’s opportunity as hospitals find ways to invest along the continuum of care—if my patients require a lot of services, I’ll never be able to service all of them. How do I build a seamless infrastructure, an ecosystem around my patient so they get the best care available when they truly need it? How do I encourage not just my organization but all other organizations’ patients rely on to head in the right direction to better serve the population?”
Your hospital won’t own every nursing home in the region, but it will depend on them. How do you reimagine what a relationship means with all these myriad services, and what kind of impact do they have on your workflow?
The barriers the industry faces in improving patient flow are familiar ones: Technology, interoperability, the usual suspects.
“The good news is there’s an easy win using existing technology. What we need is not technological interoperability but business workflow interoperability,” says Graney. “Discharging a patient to a skilled nursing facility is a bespoke process that could be one of a hundred paths. What if we start to define what our standard practice is, what we need from our partnered organizations and what those partnered organizations need from us? There’s opportunity to get the workflow right by understanding the true nature of those relationships.”
- Care management: The new center of gravity
It’s time to get care management out of the basement—literally—and into the spotlight, Graney says.
“I spend a lot of time in and out of health systems and hospitals and I’m shocked by how frequently the care management office is in the basement of the building. For me, it speaks to a real misunderstanding of care management’s importance and the value they can deliver to the bottom line and the organization’s mission,” he says. “I think care management is the ambassador of the health system. They’re both your representative and, in a way, your procurement officer. They do a lot of spending on the organization’s behalf to help connect patients to whatever services they need.”
Care management has a lot of influence on decisions impacting inpatient capacity, quality of care, and what gets incentivized among organizational partners.
“If you think about how many referrals health systems send out of the building every day in terms of both dollars and care, this is a big opportunity to throw away,” says Graney. “It’s a process that could go a million ways today and we don’t have a clear perspective that we’re aligned around that lets partners know what we expect from them.”
This is a major underinvestment that can be corrected by putting care management on the frontline of decisions made about the types of care patients need and receive.
“Every health system needs to have a system in place so they can choose the best quality option for their patients,” says Graney.
- A move toward intelligent patient placement
Healthcare is, in many ways, a very complex shopping experience as you look for whatever services you get next will be, says Graney.
“This is a moment that deserves quite a bit of precision and thought, but today it can be very hard to do a sophisticated, fully-backed process so we really know what our options are,” says Graney.
He talks about his own experiences searching for care for his uncle with early-onset Alzheimer’s searching for the bet memory care unit to help him.
“We were on our own searching for the best unit and it became our job to figure this out,” he says. “There’s an opportunity to set standards to deliver care in the community, to match your discharging patient with the next level of service and providing them with the right information so they’re not relying on the last billboard they saw.
“By being very intentional about patient matching and moving patient through the community, we can create the opportunity for care providers to put their names in front of the patient so they can compare them fairly against a standardized metric—and now you’ve got patient choice,” Graney says.
- Making care delays a top strategic risk
By lending a voice to care management and listening to their advice the industry will put the patient at the center of the moment of transition and uncover all their options for them.
“Let me show you all that’s out there. We want to avoid you waiting when there’s a great option,” says Graney. “I think this means moving from an enterprise workflow around referrals to a human-centered process where patients are placed in the middle to help them make smart choices. We need to trust their decision-making and reward and incentivize organizations to do the right thing.”
Change is always difficult in healthcare, but if you can find a goal worth putting effort into, it’s possible, Graney says.
“I think we as a country and industry need to tell ourselves our healthcare teams are capable of innovation and are willing to put in the time to make it happen,” says Graney. “We owe patients more information and a better way to make decisions. We want to help them thrive by knowing where to go to get better.”
Matt Phillion is a freelance writer covering healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. He can be reached at matthew.phillion@gmail.com.