Private equitys recipe for hospitals? It’s about technology with all the attire
A MEDICAL PURCHASE OF WEAPONS: Private equity spending in healthcare is exploding. And one place it is evident in hospitals that have left their growth with robotic surgery, digital mammography and other technical tools.
New research in the journal Health Affairs suggests that the flow of investment may push hospitals to chase profits. The study found that investment in technology-driven services such as cardiac surgery or catheterization increased in hospitals acquired by private equity firms – while the provision of some low-margin services declined.
Researchers from Duke and Rice universities found that hospitals were 6.2 percent more likely to offer robotic surgery and 4.1 percent more likely to offer digital mammography after being acquired by private equity firms. Another trend: a shift to independent emergency departments from emergency services that are part of health systems – which the authors say could limit access to care in certain areas.
“The key here is that they are more of these [investments] faster, not necessarily that non-private equity acquired hospitals do not do it at all, “said Marcelo Cerullo, lead author of the newspaper and resident at Duke University Hospital.
The research suggested Hospital administrators may not be so willing to invest in unprofitable services like adult day care, maternity wards and childbirth and childbirth.
Private equity firms generally move quickly to strengthen a company’s value before selling it, typically over three to seven years, which encourages companies to adopt strategies that focus heavily on profit, experts say.
“[Private equity] companies go after money like sharks after blood, ”said Ge Bai, professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Healthcare buyouts hit $ 100 billion in 2018 – more than 20 times higher than in 2000, according to an estimate. About one in 10 patients discharged from hospitals in 2017 were discharged from privately owned institutions. Some of the major players included Bain Capital, GTCR and Cerberus Capital Management.
“There’s just a lot of what we call dry powder waiting to be invested, ”said Sabrina Howell, an assistant professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a researcher at the Private Equity Research Consortium.
The money is flowing into some of the most profitable high-tech industries, such as robotic-assisted surgery, which allows surgeons to perform complex colorectal, gynecological and other procedures in minimally invasive ways, allowing for faster recovery times. Digital mammography takes pictures of the breast – sometimes 3D – to detect more invasive cancers and in some cases reduce the need for biopsies.
A spokesman for the American Investment Council, a group representing private equity firms, said private equity-acquired facilities improve care and foster innovation that helps reduce Medicare costs, pointing to a MedPAC report from earlier in the year. year.
Critics say the investor-driven race to increase hospital values has a price. Rosemary Batt, professor of women and work at Cornell University, said private equity ownership and focus on recent advances could result in understaffing and lower-quality equipment.
“There is growing evidence of the negative effect on both patients and workers,” Batt said.
Duke and Rice researchers said one way to solve this is to consider rules that ensure equal access and delivery of care. Transparency is among the most important things to look at, Cerullo said, because private equity firms are not subject to the stringent reporting requirements required of listed companies.
Experts generally agreed that more transparency in these private agreements would be a step forward. Anaeze Offodile, a writer on paper and a fellow in domestic health policy at Rice’s Baker Institute, said it would lead to more accountability.
“When there is a mismatch between profitability and patient well-being, regulatory control is needed … to prevent PE companies’ over-enthusiasm in highly cost-effective services that could harm patients,” Bai said.
Welcome back to Future Pulse, where we explore the convergence of healthcare and technology. Share your news and feedback: @dariustahir, @ali_lev, @abettel, @ TheSabin923, @_BenLeonard.
Christina Farr @chrissyfarr “Hearing that 2021 was a great year for plastic surgeons, in many cases their best ever.
Why?
Zoom effect (people see their faces all day long) + WFH makes schedules more flexible ”
QUESTIONS ABOUT ONLINE ERROR INFORMATION FOR THE AMA PRESIDENT: The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates last week adopted a policy to address misinformation about public health online. The policy focuses on combating false claims made by healthcare professionals about Covid-19 transfer, treatments, and public health precautions.
POLITICO’s Darius Tahir spoke with AMA President Gerald Harmon, a family doctor in South Carolina, about how conspiracy theories and other false claims affect decision making. The conversation was edited for length and clarity:
Unfortunately, the history of misinformation in medicine is quite long. I am thinking of therapies like laetrile in the 1970s, a so-called miracle cancer cure based on chemicals found in fruit pits. Is it due to the proliferation of that technology or another social change?
I have been through this, as a student at the time and as a clinician for most of my 40-year career. Now, at the end of my career path, I’m still dealing with misinformation. It may not be a quantifiable amount of misinformation out there, but I think access to it is much easier these days because of social media, the internet.
What can doctors do about it?
We ask our profession, our organization and our board to work with stakeholders, other professional companies, to address and combat disinformation currently being disseminated by them in healthcare. I have why ;, I do not yet have how. I have the goal in front of me.
What effects of misinformation have you seen first hand?
In the first part of the medicine where I practice, I would even two weeks ago visit patients in the hospital who had the opportunity to be vaccinated, with what is a free vaccination and incredibly safe – one of the miracles of the 21st century , we have been able to evolve – and they still refused.
Now they are sick of Covid, their families were all desperate, their lives are threatened. I would never go in there and say you were wrong, I do not understand why you did not take the vaccine, in an accusatory format, but they certainly wished they had listened to their trusted family counselor or family doctor about the vaccine.
COVID LOSS OF ODOR QUANTIFIED: Between 700,000 and 1.6 million Americans have suffered a long-term loss of odor due to Covid-19, according to an analysis in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, which adds to the growing amount of research on the chronic effects of the virus.
Olfactory dysfunction, or OD that lasts six months or longer, is associated with loss of appetite, decreased social well-being, concerns about personal hygiene and depression, which is equivalent to “a new concern for public health”, which deserves more study, the authors write from Washington University School of Medicine. The condition was discovered in August 2020 and affects a younger demographic group than the 80-year-old and older cohort that loses odor mostly for non-covid reasons.
The researchers say their findings may underestimate the extent of the problem because state-reported positive cases of Covid-19 are unlikely to reflect the entire infected population, and estimates of OD are drawn from healthier, outpatients who are not hospitalized.
DRUG DECISIONS MAINTAINED: The Food and Drug Administration had not made decisions on 52 applications for humane drugs per. September 30, solely because it was unable to perform inspections or assessments of facilities, according to an update released by the agency this week.
The agency said it conducted 1,139 domestic surveillance inspections of human and animal medical products in the financial year 2021 – a figure higher than the baseline scenario for 851 surveillance inspectors predicted in an inspection roadmap in May. The Agency also conducted 74 foreign inspections of human and animal medicinal products between April and September.
“The FDA is currently developing a plan for the resumption of priority foreign inspections, including surveillance and application-related inspections, starting in February 2022 for all goods,” the agency said.
CEO RÅRERER ASTRAZENECA SHOT FOR ELDERLY PEOPLE: The head of AstraZeneca has suggested that the company’s adenovirus vaccine may provide longer-lasting protection against Covid-19, especially in the elderly, than the mRNA vaccines from BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna, writes POLITICO’s Helen Collis.
CEO Pascal Soriot told BBC Radio that it could be a reason why the UK has not experienced the same high level of hospital admissions as Europe, where cases have risen in recent months. But he added that more data was needed.
“In the UK, this vaccine was used to vaccinate older people, whereas people in Europe initially thought the vaccine did not work on older people,” he said. The Chief Pharmacologist suggested that this could be due to the fact that AstraZeneca’s shot provides a better T cell response than mRNA vaccines.
Pressed on whether rising hospitalizations in Europe were linked to EU countries not using adenovirus jabs in the elderly, Soriot said: “There is no evidence of anything. We do not know. But we need more data to analyze this and get the answer. “
Withdrawals in telecommunications health are a threat to leave patients stranded, reports The Wall Street Journal.
A profile of life in northern Nevada without reliable internet – affecting health care – from National Public Radio.
Technology is fragmenting care, rather than sewing it together, claims a piece in MedPage Today.
No comments: