2026 Healthcare Financial Outlook Report
Strata’s 2026 Healthcare Financial Outlook Report features results from our annual survey of healthcare finance leaders nationwide, examining the risks, priorities, and opportunities shaping the year ahead.
The Evolution of Forecasting
Healthcare finance is entering a new era—one where AI and predictive analytics are transforming how organizations forecast, plan, and make strategic decisions. This whitepaper explores how leading healthcare organizations are moving beyond traditional, siloed forecasting approaches toward more integrated, data-driven models.
Healthcare Performance Trends: Q4 2025
Hospitals and health systems nationwide continue to navigate uneven financial pressures that weighed on performance in late 2025 and continued to strain financial results at the start of 2026, according to the Q4 Strata Performance Trends report.
Key findings include:
2026 Q1 Strata Town Hall
As margin pressure, reimbursement shifts, and accelerating AI adoption continue to shape the healthcare landscape, this session will connect emerging trends to Strata’s 2026 direction.
The session will cover:
Healthcare Finance Trends Insights from the recent J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, key themes that emerged from our recent survey of healthcare finance leaders nationwide, and year-end performance signals shaping 2026 priorities.
FI Webinar: Seeing Beyond Averages to Unlock Profitability
Growth alone doesn’t guarantee value creation. Funds Transfer Pricing (FTP) gives finance leaders the ability to look past high-level averages and understand profitability at its true economic level—by product, customer, and channel. In this webinar, we’ll examine how a disciplined FTP approach attributes margin correctly across lending and funding activities, delivering clearer insights, more effective pricing, and tighter alignment between financial results and business performance.
Heightening Performance Through Labor Uncertainty
Strata’s new e-book, Heightening Performance Through Labor Uncertainty, outlines five fundamental labor management strategies used by high-performing healthcare organizations to control costs, improve efficiencies, and sustain performance, without compromising care delivery.
Investing in People and Technology: Aligning Talent, Tools, and ROI
Healthcare CFOs are being asked to do more than protect margins. Today’s leaders are expected to invest confidently in people and technology, and clearly demonstrate the return on both.
Maximizing Revenue & Reimbursements with Integrated Revenue Analytics
Shifting policies and attitudes toward transparency in healthcare pricing and reimbursement continue to impact the industry. Meanwhile, limited resources and technologies leave hospitals and health systems subject to data gaps, overload, and inconsistencies.
Payors often come to contract negotiations with more data and deeper insights — putting hospitals and health systems at a disadvantage. In today's landscape, finance leaders need more precision, preparation, and credible data to level the playing field.
Leveraging AI to Improve Data Quality
In today’s data-driven healthcare environment, the quality of financial data directly impacts an organization’s ability to operate efficiently, remain compliant, and sustain long-term performance. Yet, inaccuracies and inconsistencies continue to undermine billing, reimbursement, forecasting, and value-based care initiatives.
Healthcare Performance Trends for MedTech
This report for MedTech organizations draws on financial, operational, and claims data sourced from Strata Decision Technology’s national network of hospitals, health systems, and other care delivery organizations.
The findings offer critical insights for vendors serving the medical industry that can inform strategic decisions around technology development, planning, and implementation.
Key findings from our Q2 2025 report include: