US: Hospital mergers did not improve quality

The quality of care at hospitals acquired during a recent wave of deal making got worse or stayed the same, new research found, a blow to a frequently cited rationale for tie-ups.

Hospital merger-and-acquisition activity has surged in recent years, with executives involved in transactions making the case that greater size will boost quality with new investments and yield other improvements as deal makers benefit from each others’ strengths.

The new research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked for evidence of quality gains using four widely used measures of performance at nearly 250 hospitals acquired in deals between 2009 and 2013. The analysis didn’t find it, said the study’s authors.

“Quality didn’t improve,” said Harvard University research associate Nancy Beaulieu, lead author of the study.
The study is one of the first large-scale efforts to examine whether hospital combinations deliver benefits to offset higher prices associated with the sector’s consolidation, said health-policy experts not involved in the research.

“For the first time there is good science,” said Susan Haas, a visiting scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s innovation center Ariadne Labs, who studies risk of harm to patients from health-care transactions. For regulators, the research offers new grounds to challenge deal makers who assert better quality will follow their transaction. Regulators can now say, “Prove it to me,” Dr. Haas said.

Full Content: Wall Street Journal

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