Charlotte, North Carolina-based Advocate Health’s operations are up $449.8 million (2.7% margin) halfway through 2024, blazing past the $85.7 million operating gain (0.6% operating margin) it’d notched at the midway point of its inaugural year.
The 69-hospital nonprofit—which formed in late 2022 with the merger of Advocate Aurora Health and Atrium Health—grew its revenue by 9.8% year over year for a total of $16.7 billion for the six-month period ended June 30.
That increase came alongside volume gains across most metrics. Discharges jumped 8.2% year over year as total surgeries and ED visits grew 1.6% and 6%, respectively. Observation cases were the main exception, dropping 9% from 2023 but only representing about a quarter of the system’s total bedded patients. Case mix index also fell slightly, by 1.1%, but was paired with a 2% decline in inpatient length of stay.
The revenue growth outpaced a 6.8% rise in Advocate Health’s total operating expenses, which landed at $16.2 billion for the half.
Salaries, wages and benefits grew at about the same rate to $9.4 billion, representing 57.9% of the system’s total expenses during the six-month period. Supplies and drugs stood as the other major growth area, rising 14.6% year over year to about $3.6 billion.
Combined with an investment-fueled $928.3 million in nonoperating income, Advocate Health logged a bottom line of nearly $1.4 billion for the first half of 2024. The nonprofit had landed just shy of a billion during the same span last year. It also reported 266 days of cash on hand and a 22.4% debt to capitalization ratio as of June 30.
Since its merger, Advocate Health has become the nation’s third-largest nonprofit health system by operating revenue, with $31.7 billion. It employs about 155,000 people and treats almost 6 million patients across its six-state footprint.
Across its first full year, the system reported $606.6 million in operating revenue and a $2.2 billion net income.
Volume and utilization improvements like those reported in the most recent quarterly filing have proven to be the norm across Advocate’s large nonprofit peers. Providence, for instance, logged a 4% increase in inpatient admissions alongside a 4% decrease in length of stay across six months. Mayo Clinic recently touted a 7.1% jump in admissions, and Mass General Brigham logged a 3% year-over-year rise in discharges for its most recent quarter.