During the recession, how should hospitals spend their money?
If this recent report is to be believed, many are spending it to upgrade their service and amenities such as upscale food, a pleasant environment, and attentive staff.
Isn’t the money better spent on, say, clinical indicators and quality measures?
Well, no. Data has shown that patients respond positively to amenities, and sadly, “from the patient perspective, hospital quality therefore embodies amenities as well as clinical quality.” In fact, such luxuries raises a hospital’s demand significantly more than clinical quality, such as mortality rates.
Until this response changes, expect more hospitals to spend more money modeling themselves after hotels.
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{ 5 comments }
Baloney. This was the first stuff to go when our hospital had to tighten its belt this fall.
On the other hand, prior to the recession, adding unnecessary but customer friendly frills has been a logical response by hospitals to the screwed up incentives of third party and government payer medicine. Patients assume most places have good care and don’t care about the total cost, just their out of pocket cost, so they choose the “nicer” facility.
For the hospitals, this is a way to attract patients whose insurance pays the bills and make up for their losses due to Medicaid and uninsured patients.
If patients had to pay these extra costs themselves, the problem would go away immediately.
press ganey rules all.
This is similar to colleges adding climbing walls and espresso cafes in the dorms, while tuition (much of it subsidized by government-guaranteed loans) steadily increases.
And yet the medical community howls in protest when anyone tries to measure quality and reimburse accordingly.
If you want to incentivize better practices/outcomes rather than fancy drapes, you need to measure those things and pay for quality while letting patients pay for shiny flat panel tv’s.
Kevin is right on with this one… Hospitals have gotten smart – they know amenities sell. Patients generally can’t discern differences in medical quality and the clinical quality indicators available today do nothing to help identify where you would want to send a family member. Most patients presume a hospital that has nice facilities inevitably provides better care (and in some ways that is likely correct). Big academic institutions with diversified revenue streams (Research, Clinical and Endowment) can afford to invest in facilities and they are the ones providing generally better care.
A great example of the new “High Amenity” care is at http://www.brighamandwomens.org/shapirocenter/Pavilion/default.aspx
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