Some health systems have recovered from the pandemic much better than others, and those with healthier margins tend to be the ones that made a stronger push into outpatient care.

The big picture: There's a wildly large and growing difference between the operating margins of top-performing health systems and those at the bottom, according to Kaufman Hall data shared with Axios.

• "The hospitals that are not performing well are performing worse, but the hospitals that are recovering are performing extremely well," firm co-founder Ken Kaufman told Axios.
• "I would say hospitals that are not doing particularly well … they're not capturing that outpatient work, or at least not at the level that they need to," he added.

Yes, but: Operating margin is only one measure of a hospital's financial health, and total margins are often much higher, said Johns Hopkins professor Gerard Anderson.

• "You diversify where there is potential profit, and they have moved into all sorts of things where there is profit," he added. "They have a whole portfolio of ways to make money now that they didn't have 20 years [ago]."
• Some experts also say that hospitals aren't disciplined about keeping costs down.
• "I think partly what happened over time is that … investments were not treated as investments, but as costs," said Yale economist Zack Cooper.

Go deeper: Hospitals forced to revamp business models or risk losing patients