When private equity moves in, safety performance falls off

HealthExec January 5, 2024
Dave Pearson

After being bought by private equity firms, hospitals tend to see significant increases in inpatient falls and infections, according to new research published in JAMA.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago arrived at the conclusion after comparing a decade’s worth of Medicare Part A claims data between 51 equity-acquired hospitals and 259 matched controls.[1]

The latter were hospitals not owned by private equity. The equity cohort comprised 662,000 hospitalizations; the control cohort, 4.2 million similar cases.

For the equity cohort, the team also assessed hospitalizations from three years before to three years after ownership changed hands.

Senior study author Zirui Song, MD, PhD, and colleagues found private equity acquisition correlated with a 25% increase in hospital-acquired...

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