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The annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference has long served as a bellwether for where the sector is headed, offering a concentrated look at the strategies, priorities, and pressures shaping the nation’s largest health systems. At this year’s conference, leaders from nearly every organization emphasized ambulatory growth relative to other types of care settings, ambulatory surgery center (ASC) expansion, and deliberate site-of-care shifts as central to their strategies for growth, access, and affordability. 

Across presentations for the conference’s not-for-profit track, what stood out was not simply the direction of travel, but the degree of commitment. Ambulatory and ASC strategies are no longer framed as incremental improvements or pilot programs. They are positioned as primary engines of growth, explicitly tied to margin resilience, consumer access, and long-term affordability. Leaders said this shift is being pursued with greater discipline than in the past, supported by targeted capital allocation and, in some cases, via selective partnerships.