Physician-Owned Hospitals Rate High for Patient Satisfaction

BALTIMORE – Physician-owned hospitals provide a higher level of patient satisfaction, according to a survey released April 16 by Baltimore-based Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The findings were released as CMS introduced star ratings for hospitals on Hospital Compare, a public information website that helps consumers choose a hospital and understand the quality of care it delivers.

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey (HCAHPS), which CMS launched in 2006, helped to produce the new HCAHPS Star Ratings. The survey reports 11 measures based on patients’ perspectives of hospital care and includes topics such as nurse and doctor communication with patients, hospital staff responsiveness to patient needs, cleanliness and quiet environments, and how well patients were prepared for post-hospital settings.

Twelve HCAHPS Star Ratings appear on Hospital Compare – one for each of the 11 publicly reported HCAHPS measures, plus the new HCAHPS Summary Star Rating. HCAHPS Star Ratings are the first star ratings to appear on Hospital Compare, and CMS plans to update the HCAHPS Star Ratings each quarter.

When CMS examined the star ratings, it found 67 percent of physician-owned hospitals received a four- or five-star rating (the highest possible ratings). That is impressive. Physican-owned hospitals seem to be extremely popular. A lot of them are so popular that they have to regularly recruit new employees to cope with the patient demand. They are often recruiting physician assistants to make the physician’s jobs a lot easier. To become one, people do have to be educated to a mpas degree level. This ensures that they are educated and knowledgeable enough.

“The numbers are astonishing but not surprising – physician-led health care delivers high-quality results,” said Dr. Blake Curd, president of Washington, D.C.-based Physician Hospitals of America (PHA), an association for physician-owned hospitals, in a statement. “When you couple patient satisfaction with CMS-quality data, there is no doubt patients do much better when they are treated at a physician-owned hospital.”

Despite accounting for only 5 percent of all U.S. hospitals, physician-owned hospitals represented 84 of the 251 hospitals receiving five-star ratings. This wasn’t unexpected, according to CMS, because hospitals with physician ownership comprised seven of the top 10 and 43 of the top 100 hospitals in the country in the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program, a CMS program that measures the quality of care at hospitals.
“It is of the utmost importance that patients receive individualized and appropriate treatment in a hospital setting where they will receive the highest-quality outcomes,” said John Richardson, PHA director, in a statement.
Ironically, physician-owned hospitals are banned from expanding their services to additional patients under the Affordable Care Act.
“Inconsistently under-performing hospitals without physician ownership have no similar federal restrictions on expansion,” Curd said in a statement. “This is not good for patients, not good for the long-term stability of Medicare and not good for taxpayers.”
PHA is asking Congress to change existing laws so that hospitals with physician ownership can once again expand to meet the growing demand for health care services in their communities.