New report reinforces hospital mergers bring better care at lower cost

New research confirms the significant value hospital mergers can generate for patients and their communities. The report, Hospital Merger Benefits: Views from Hospital Leaders and Econometric Analysis – An Update, was prepared by economists from Charles River Associates and is an update of their 2017 report. The latest findings both reinforce and strengthen the previous report’s conclusions that hospital mergers result in benefits that accrue to patients in the form of better care and reduced costs. 

The newest analysis demonstrates that mergers can lead to enhanced quality through the expansion of clinical best practices, as evidenced by statistically significant declines in the rates of readmission and mortality rates following mergers. The study highlights how scale is increasingly critical to maintain and enhance the infrastructure necessary to address social determinants of health, adopt population health strategies and promote value-driven care.

In addition, integration can ensure that local access to care and breadth of services are maintained for patients, and in some cases expanded. Mergers can offer financial stability for struggling hospitals through operational efficiencies associated with shared costs for expensive IT infrastructures and purchasing, access to a robust network of system resources, equipment and facility upgrades. Newly integrated systems are also able to provide patients with access across the full continuum of care. This leads to more regular and convenient access to physicians, including specialists. 

Key findings also include:

• Mergers decrease costs. Due to increased scale, acquisitions decrease costs and are associated with a statistically significant 2.3% reduction in annual operating expenses.  
• Mergers often facilitate quality improvement through updating clinical operations across a health system, implementing consistent best practices and enhancing the promise of technology and data analytics. 
• Revenues per admission at acquired hospitals decline by a statistically significant 3.5% relative to non-merging hospitals, which suggests that “savings that accrue to merging hospitals are passed on to patients and their health plans.”

Click here for a full copy of the Charles River Associates study.  
 

The American Hospital Association (AHA) is the national organization that represents and serves all types of hospitals, health care networks, and their patients and communities. Nearly 5,000 hospitals, health care systems, networks, other providers of care and 43,000 individual members come together to form the AHA.