Outpatient visits fell 7.5% in May 2026, matching a seasonal dip seen in May and June of 2024 and 2025, according to Chicago-based Strata Decision Technology’s latest Performance Trends Report.
The report looks at hospital financial, operational and encounter data from the first half of 2026. It draws on Strata’s Comparative Analytics data, which covers more than 2,200 hospitals, and on its StrataSphere encounter database.
Here are five outpatient findings from the report:
1. Nine of the 10 service lines behind the May decline were elective or schedulable services, such as physicals, colonoscopies, mammograms, therapy and follow-up visits. The largest seasonal drop in earlier years was about 10%, in June 2024.
2. Hospitals with 25 or fewer beds got roughly 10% of their gross operating revenue from inpatient care. Hospitals with more than 500 beds got nearly half. Smaller hospitals have a much higher outpatient revenue mix.
3. Of the four census regions, Midwest hospitals had the highest share of revenue from outpatient care and the lowest from inpatient care.
4. In service lines where more than 90% of volume is outpatient, inpatient case mix index keeps rising as lower-acuity cases move out of the hospital. CMI rose about 1% to 3% year over year from the first quarter of 2024 through 2026.
5. Gynecology inpatient volumes fell 8% in the first half of 2026, and median CMI is up 2.17% since the first quarter of 2024. The report says this fits with hysterectomies moving to outpatient settings as minimally invasive techniques have improved.
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