Patients at private-equity-owned hospitals get more infections and fall more often, says a new study by Harvard researchers
Patients receiving care at hospitals owned by private-equity firms get more bloodstream and surgical site infections and fall more often, says a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Patients receiving care at hospitals owned by private-equity firms experience more bloodstream and surgical site infections and they fall more often, a new study by academics at Harvard University and the University of Chicago has found.
The research, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, comes after previous studies that had asserted patients of private-equity-owned health care entities pay higher costs, experience reduced staffing levels and, in the case of nursing homes, have higher death rates.
The new study is by Dr. Sneha Kannan and Dr. Zirui Song, both of Harvard, and Joseph Dov Bruch of the University of Chicago. It focused on patients’ health outcomes in private-equity-owned hospitals, an area, the academics said, where research has been scant. Private-equity firms have bought out more than 200 hospitals from non-private-equity owners, the study noted. In addition, as NBC News has previously reported, an estimated 40% of hospital emergency departments across the country are managed by private-equity-backed staffing companies.
Early literature on private equity in hospitals “focused largely on changes in economic outcomes and staffing and some measures of process quality,” Song told NBC News in an interview. “We are aiming to examine changes in more meaningful measures of clinical quality at these hospitals after acquisition.”
Private-equity firms are sophisticated financiers that buy companies, usually load them with significant amounts of debt to pay for the acquisitions and hope to sell them in a few years at a profit. Over the past decade, eyeing hefty profit potential, these financiers have invested $1 trillion in health care companies.
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