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Dr. Poses goes after Steward Health Care

 

Roy Poses,  M.D., in his Health Care Renewal blog,  denounces Steward Health Care, a private-equity creature that will sell off its hospitals but continue to operate all of them.

His comments stem from a Sept. 26 Boston Globe article leading off with:

“Steward Health Care System said  that it lined up $1.25 billion from a real estate investment firm that will help the Boston-based company finance a national expansion, pay off debt, and return money to the private equity firm that bought it almost six years ago.

“Steward said Medical Properties Trust Inc. would buy all of its hospital properties for $1.2 billion and pay $50 million for a 5 percent equity stake in the company. Steward will lease the properties from MPT, based in Birmingham, Ala.”

Dr. Poses writes:

“Steward Health Care, as run by Cerberus {a private-equity firm}, was one of the earlier leaders in hiring corporate physicians, whom it pressured to avoid ‘leakage’ of patients to other hospitals and doctors, even if some might question whether the care provided elsewhere might be better for those patients. The multimillion dollar a year CEO of Steward suggested the health care had become a commodity, objectionable to those who thought that health care should be a mission-based calling.

“After Steward consolidated, operational misadventures began.  In 2013, it closed the pediatric unit at Morton Hospital {in Attleboro, Mass.}  In 2014, it closed Quincy Hospital, despite promises that it would expand health care services, and specifically not close that hospital so quickly.   Starting in 2014, Steward stonewalled state requests to disclose financial data as required by state regulations after the private equity takeover.   In 2016, Steward continued to withhold financial data  and closed the short-lived family medicine residency program at Carney Hospital,  amidst complaints by the residents about poor organization, and inadequate numbers of faculty.”

To read Dr. Poses’s entry, please hit this link.

To read The Globe’s story, please his this link.

 

 


Marketing bigger and quieter ERs

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Hospitals are increasingly investing in emergency rooms, trying to make them as comfortable and attractive as possible to snare new patients.

Boston-based for-profit Steward Health Care System, for instance, has opened up a new $25 million emergency department at Morton Hospital, in Taunton, Mass., with 43 private rooms, doubling the size of the old department and making care a lot quieter.

A Boston Globe reporter, on a recent visit, found that the “larger space, designed to give the caregivers more room to work and patients more privacy, concealed that the department….was actually pretty full.”

“The project is the fifth emergency department redesign at hospitals owned by …{Steward} and part of a strategy by Steward and other providers not only to improve emergency services, but also to respond to the competition for patients from other hospitals and new rivals such as urgent care centers,” The Globe reported.

“Emergency departments are the front door to the hospital,”  Jay A. Kaplan, M.D., president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians, told the paper: “[Patients’] impression in the emergency department is going to affect how they perceive their entire hospital stay.”

“The upgrades are part of Steward’s efforts to attract more patients to community hospitals rather than lose them to larger and more expensive teaching hospitals, ” of which they are plenty in Greater Boston.

 

 


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