Harvard Magazine April 16, 2024
When private equity runs the business of healthcare, patients may suffer.
IS PRIVATE EQUITY monetizing medicine at patients’ expense? According to associate professor of health care policy and medicine Zirui Song and other Harvard researchers, patients in hospitals owned by private equity firms suffered significantly more hospital-acquired adverse events than those being cared for in similar hospitals with no such investor participation. Song, director of research at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care, analyzed more than 4.8 million Medicare claims tied to hospital stays between 2009 and 2019. Patients in the hospitals acquired by private equity firms experienced 25.4 percent more hospital-acquired conditions. Underlying that alarming overall difference was a 37.7 percent increase in central-line associated bloodstream infections and...
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