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Healthcare Leaves the Hospital, Virtual Care’s $248B Run, AI’s Next Test
Care is moving outpatient, virtual care is scaling fast, and healthcare AI faces its orchestration test.
Gaston Brizuela Bosio
September 15, 2026
Good morning, ! Healthcare’s center of gravity is moving beyond the hospital walls. Outpatient care is taking a larger share of the economics, virtual care is heading toward $248B, and AI’s next challenge is moving from isolated tools to orchestrating entire healthcare workflows.
Plus, we look at what the FDA’s GenAI approach could mean for MedTech—and the cost pressures building across the healthcare system.
Know someone in the healthcare space who should see this? Forward it their way. Here’s the link.
— The Healthcare150 Team
DATA DIVE
Follow the Money: Healthcare Is Moving Out of the Hospital
For decades, the hospital was the economic center of U.S. healthcare. That center of gravity is shifting.
Outpatient care accounted for just 28% of U.S. hospital revenue in 1994. By 2018, it had climbed to 48%, nearly matching inpatient care. More importantly, outpatient revenue grew at a 9% CAGR from 2011–2018, versus 6% for inpatient services.
This is more than a change in where patients receive care. It is a redistribution of healthcare economics. Advances in clinical technology, payer pressure and value-based reimbursement are pushing more procedures toward hospital outpatient departments, ASCs and, increasingly, the home.
The investor takeaway: capital increasingly needs to follow care outside the hospital walls. As higher-value procedures become viable in lower-cost settings, outpatient infrastructure moves from a complementary asset to a strategic necessity for health systems—and a growing opportunity across ASCs, MedTech and care-enablement platforms.
HEALTHTECH CORNER
Virtual Care’s Next Growth Phase
Virtual care is shifting from a pandemic-era access story into a much larger healthcare delivery market. According to Precedence Research, the market is projected to grow from $20.1B in 2025 to $247.6B by 2034, implying roughly a 32% CAGR.
The more important signal is the acceleration. Market size is expected to pass $100B in 2031, then add more than $100B over the following three years. That suggests virtual care is moving beyond standalone consultations toward broader integration across monitoring, chronic care, specialty access, and digitally enabled care pathways.
Why it matters: growth at this pace raises the bar for operators. Access alone becomes less differentiated as the category scales. The stronger positions will likely belong to platforms that can embed into clinical workflows, demonstrate measurable outcomes, and capture recurring healthcare spend rather than episodic visits.
Bottom line: Virtual care is becoming infrastructure. The investment question is shifting from who can acquire patients to who can become indispensable to care delivery. (More)
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TREND TO WATCH
Healthcare’s AI Problem Isn’t Adoption — It’s Orchestration
Healthcare is lagging other industries in the transition from AI experimentation to scaled deployment. KPMG’s sector positioning places Healthcare at roughly 0.40 in both AI scaling maturity and agentic orchestration capability, compared with approximately 0.80 and 0.75, respectively, for Technology, Media & Telecommunications.
The bigger issue is what that gap means for healthcare’s workforce challenge. As labor shortages increase pressure on existing capacity, AI will need to move beyond isolated productivity tools toward orchestrating workflows across EHRs, scheduling, clinical operations, and administrative processes. The opportunity is less about adding copilots and more about redesigning how healthcare work gets done.
Why it matters: healthcare’s relatively low AI maturity creates significant whitespace for platforms that can translate automation into measurable productivity and capacity gains. Bottom line: the next phase of healthcare AI will be defined by orchestration, not adoption. For investors, the winners may be the companies that become embedded in workflows rather than simply adding another AI feature.
