Dec. 26 (UPI) — The trend of private equity firms purchasing hospitals is making them less safe and lessening the quality of care, a study released by Harvard Medical School on Tuesday says.
The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found falls and infections increased in hospitals after they were acquired by private equity firms. The increase in incidents was more than 25%.
These incidents are referred to as “hospital-acquired adverse events” in the study.
Researchers studied 51 privately acquired hospitals in the three years before and after acquisition. It also used 259 hospitals that were not acquired by private equities as a control group.
Incidents in which the hospital was responsible for further injury or illness were observed in more than 10,000 hospitalizations. There was an increase in falls by more than 27%. Bloodstream infections increased by more than 37%.
Private equity firms have invested about $1 trillion into hospital systems in the past decade, including $200 billion in 2021 alone. There are more than 380 hospitals in the United States owned by private equity firms, according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. More than one-third of these hospitals serve rural communities.
Zirui Song, director of research in the Center for Primary Care at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement that hospitals also charged higher prices for care after being acquired by a private equity firm.
“We had previously found that private equity acquisitions led to higher charges, prices, and societal spending,” Song said. “Now, we’re learning that there are also downstream concerns for the clinical quality of care delivered to hospital patients.”
Song added that when healthcare systems purchase a hospital they do not often borrow to do so. Private equity purchases on the other hand compile large amounts of debt to make these purchases.
Sneha Kannan, a research fellow at Harvard and a physician, expressed wariness about the growing role of private equities in hospital systems.
“Hospital success is measured not only in dollars or the number of patients who pass through the doors, but also in lives saved, complication rates, patient satisfaction, and a number of other quality and safety metrics,” Kannan said in a statement. “We need to make sure we fully understand the costs and benefits of this prominent new force in health care.”
