Hospital mergers and acquisitions not linked to better care, study finds

When a merger or acquisition occurs in healthcare, the conjoining providers often say that patient experience will benefit as a result. But new findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that may not be the case.

In fact, the study found just the opposite: Acquired hospitals actually actually saw a patient experience that was moderately worse, on average. What’s more, 30-day mortality and readmission rates stayed largely the same at such facilities.

The only real improvement that was found among the majority of acquired entities was in the realm of clinical process, which improved modestly. But the improvement was so incremental that it couldn’t be linked to the actual acquisition, and prices for commercially insured patients tended to be higher.