Reading The Future: Health Care (40 Years of Arkansas Business)

Bo Ryall, president and CEO of the Arkansas Hospital Association (Karen E. Segrave)

Editor’s note: This article is part of a special magazine celebrating 40 years of Arkansas Business. The full magazine is available here.

The next two years are expected to be bumpy for the health care industry in Arkansas, as hospitals continue to feel financial pain from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic took providers out of the workforce and increased the cost of labor, resulting in a hospital landscape that, a decade from now, will look very different.

During the last few years, Arkansas hasn’t seen the wave of hospital closures that other areas have because the state expanded its Medicaid coverage in 2014, said Dr. Cam Patterson, chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

“But I suspect that 2024 may be the year that our luck runs out,” he said.

Bo Ryall, president and CEO of the Arkansas Hospital Association, expects that in the next year or two, hospitals will endure some tough financial times. They will try to slash costs, but that’s difficult when labor is a hospital’s biggest expense.

“Hospitals will look at partnerships with other hospital systems to see if they can share service lines in some way to save money,” he said. “I think there could be possibly more mergers or management agreements with hospitals that are facing financial challenges.”

Troy Wells, Baptist Health president and CEO, said he expects smaller hospitals will join larger networks. And down the road, “you may even see some systems consolidate,” Wells said.

The way health care is delivered is also changing. The shift from inpatient to outpatient care is expected to continue, as many procedures can be performed safely on an outpatient basis, said Chad Aduddell, the CEO of the CHI St. Vincent health system in Little Rock. “And the patient can go home and recover at home with great outcomes and a quicker recovery,” he said.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is expected to shake up the health care industry. AI now is being used in the back office of health systems to manage claims and filings and is making billing faster and more accurate, Aduddell said.

But in the future, AI will play a prominent role in the clinical setting. AI is expected to help compensate for the shortage of providers, with telehealth visits increasing.

Patterson said that in 10 to 15 years, access to care shouldn’t be an issue for Arkansans. “We’ll be better able to keep patients in their communities and still provide them with advanced levels of care,” he said.

Technology also will improve the quality of care, Wells said. AI “may even allow us to provide more care with fewer people in the future,” he said. “That’s the hope, that we can make caregivers efficient, more effective, because … there’s not going to be enough people.”

He also expects to see advancements continue in the pharmaceutical industry. “I can only imagine 10 years from now what we’ll be able to solve by taking a pill,” Wells said. “I hope that we’ll see some really terrible diseases that no longer exist in 10 years, or are treatable, and they just go away.”

Aduddell forecast continued advances in robotic surgery that will employ minimally invasive procedures that are safer and have faster recovery times.

Patterson said that while surgical technology is continuing to evolve, caution is called for. “Having said that, we need to be judicious with the resources that we have,” he said. “Just doing a procedure with the robot to do a procedure with the robot — which takes longer and doesn’t necessarily have better outcomes than a standard laparoscopic procedure — doesn’t make sense, either,” Patterson said. “So technology should be at the service of the patients we care for, not the other way around.”