Journalist Steven Brill found that Norman Roth of Greenwich (Conn.) Hospital, a part of the Yale New Haven Health System; Thomas Priselac, of Cedar Sinai Health, in Los Angeles, and Steven M. Safyer, of Montefiore Health System, in New York, were the highest-paid hospital CEOs based on a new metric that Mr. Brill has developed: patient days.
He used the new benchmark in a piece for Axios to determine, in the words of FierceHealthcare, “not only how much hospital CEOs earn, but how much it costs patients. Brill came up with his lists by merging American Hospital Directory data about hospital operations, including patient bed and total patient days, with IRS information filed by nonprofit hospitals about CEO compensation. He then came up with lists of reported annual payouts to CEOs divided by the annual number of patient days recorded at each hospital.”
“Mr. Brill’s piece was accurately headlined “Stay in a hospital, pay the CEO $56 a night.” That headline suggests one reason that the U.S. healthcare system is by far the most expensive in the world.
“Although the benchmark isn’t a perfect measure to compare CEOs, Brill said it is a good way to compare the relative scope of responsibilities for each CEO because it measures the number of patients each hospital serves and the extent of that service,” the news service reported.
Roth, the head of the southern Connecticut hospital for the last nine months of the fiscal year 2015, earned $56 for each patient night stay, based on his annual salary and bonus of $2.9 million and the 184 beds he supervised. Greenwich is one of America’s richest communities.
The next-highest earner was Thomas Priselac, who earned $13.99 per patient stay.
To read the Axios piece, please hit this link.
To read the FierceHealthcare report, please hit this link.