Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare added about 100 facilities to its outpatient footprint in 2025 and the system heads into 2026 and 2027 with “significant capital in the pipeline” for outpatient development, CEO Sam Hazen said.
The 190-hospital system now has about 2,700 outpatient facilities and is pushing toward a target of between 18 and 20 facilities per hospital by the end of the decade, Mr. Hazen said on HCA’s Jan. 27 earnings call.
Mr. Hazen said that outpatient growth will come through building new facilities as well as through acquisition opportunities. He said HCA is seeing more acquisition opportunities within its outpatient footprint than it has seen in the past few years.
“We continue to execute on those appropriately, assuming we can get to a responsible deal, and we have been able to accomplish that in certain circumstances,” he said.
Mr. Hazen said that outpatient revenue as a percentage of total revenue was up year over year in the fourth quarter, noting that one of the reasons for that growth is the fact that HCA is adding outpatient units at a greater pace than inpatient hospitals.
“The combination of that, we think, is important to our overall network resiliency,” he said. “By that we mean creating an environment where patients have easier access into the HCA Healthcare system, and our payers actually have better price points for their members, such that they can get into the system with urgent care or a physician clinic or an ambulatory surgery center in a manner that is most productive for them as a patient.”
HCA Healthcare reported a net income of $6.8 billion in 2025, a 17.8% increase year over year. The system is projecting a net income between $6.5 billion and $7 billion in 2026.
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