From Hospital to Home: Why Non‑Acute Care Is Surging and What We Have to Fix First

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5 hours ago
4 min read

U.S. healthcare is profoundly shifting from acute to non-acute care – skilled nursing facilities, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long‑term care hospitals, home health agencies, hospice, nursing facilities, and senior living. Forecasts estimate that the global home health care agency market will grow from about USD 305 billion in 2025 to more than USD 551 billion by 2032 (CAGR ~8.8%), and that the broader home healthcare market will reach roughly USD 771 billion by 2032 (CAGR ~8.5%). The U.S. post‑acute care market is projected at roughly USD 491 billion in 2025 and could approach USD 899 billion by 2035.

Non‑acute care is where more recovery and long‑term support now happen, and where more growth is coming. For leaders in these settings, this shows up as more complex discharges, more chronic disease, and tighter staffing. The real question is whether today’s systems, especially those for documentation and workflows, can handle the scale and complexity that is now landing in non‑acute care.

The Structural Problem: High Need, Old Tools, Tight Margins

Patients arriving at post‑acute and long‑term care providers have higher acuity, more comorbidities, and more social needs, often after shorter hospital stays. At the same time, Medicare, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage keep pressure on payment rates, while wages and compliance costs rise.

Most non‑acute EMRs and documentation tools were built to replace paper: capture required forms, store records, and produce bills. They largely achieved that goal. They were not built to minimize clicks for clinicians, to support real‑time operations, or to scale with a market approaching USD 900 billion.

The effect is simple and costly:

Clinicians spend a large share of each shift documenting and navigating systems instead of delivering care.
Documentation issues drive denials, delays, and survey findings.
Leaders rely on delayed reports instead of current, actionable signals.

Recent studies show the upside if this layer is redesigned. A 2025 study found that better EMR workflows and tools saved about 75 minutes of documentation time per shift and improved documentation quality. Another 2025 analysis found that EHR efficiency tools significantly reduced nurses’ time in flowsheets and in the EHR overall. A 2025 nursing study showed that voice‑enabled documentation reduced time per nursing assessment by 28.8% and improved usability scores. In a labor‑heavy, low‑margin business, that kind of time savings changes the math.

Why Non‑Acute Care Must Grow and Why Efficiency Is Non‑Negotiable

Three forces ensure that non‑acute care will keep growing.

Demographics and chronic disease. The population is aging. Older adults live longer with multiple chronic conditions and functional limitations. This drives sustained demand for post‑acute care in SNFs, IRFs, LTCHs, HHAs, and hospice, as well as for long‑term services and supports in nursing facilities and senior living.
Patient and family preference. Households want care at home or in community settings when safe to do so. Market analyses link home health and home care growth to this preference.
Payer and system strategy. Public payers and Medicare Advantage are pushing services out of acute‑care hospitals into lower‑cost non‑acute settings. The projected rise of US post‑acute spending toward USD 900 billion reflects that shift.

Non‑acute care must absorb this growth. But if we keep the same infrastructure, we will scale documentation friction, burnout, denials, and survey risk along with volume. Efficiency is not a nice‑to‑have; it is how non‑acute providers stay open and able to take referrals. And the biggest lever for efficiency is documentation and the workflows around it.

What We’re Doing With NurseMagic™

NurseMagic was built around this problem. We saw non‑acute clinicians and leaders spending too much time and energy on documentation. Our starting assumption was direct: if we can make documentation in post‑acute and other non‑acute settings much easier and more reliable, we can improve staff experience and organizational performance.

We took a staged approach.

Start with the point of care. Our first products helped clinicians in skilled nursing, home health, hospice, and senior living create high‑quality, compliant notes and forms faster, in the structures required by those settings. The aim was accurate, survey‑ready, reimbursement‑appropriate documentation, not generic AI text.
Scale to the enterprise. As clinicians adopted the tools, organizations asked for secure, enterprise‑wide deployment, census‑aligned pricing, and integration with existing EMRs and billing systems. We expanded to support multi‑site operators across non‑acute segments, always anchored in metrics such as minutes per note, on‑time completion, and documentation completeness.
Build infrastructure. In late 2025, we introduced an AI‑native EMR designed for post‑acute and other non‑acute providers to serve as the documentation and workflow engine or to work alongside legacy systems. The goal is to put AI‑driven documentation, compliance logic, and reimbursement checks into the core workflow, not on the side.

At each step, we moved only when we saw real improvements in the numbers that matter to non‑acute operators: less documentation time, more complete notes, fewer problems tied to documentation.

The Race to Replace Old Infrastructure

The first generation of non‑acute systems did what they were asked to do: get providers off paper. The next generation has to do more. It has to:

Take friction (and minutes) out of every note and assessment.
Make it easy to do documentation “right the first time” for CMS, states, and payers.
Support growing volumes and acuity without forcing one‑to‑one increases in staff.

That is the work we are focused on. Non‑acute operators need to handle more patients, with more complexity, under tighter margins. Our job is to rebuild the documentation and workflow layer so that it is possible, with less friction for clinicians and a business that can sustain itself as non‑acute care becomes a central part of U.S. healthcare.