Do Hospital Amenities = Value?

There was an article in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News, Hospitals compete for patients with creature comforts, by Jim Landers that shares how hospitals are making huge capital expenditures in the name of patient satisfaction. The purported impetus behind this is in recognition of Medicare payments tied to patient-satisfaction scores under the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program. But there also has to be an element of competitive market positioning that is more to do with attracting a patient than satisfying a patient.

In either case, an obvious concern has to be to what extent, if any, more attractive aesthetics, better tasting food and higher speed Wi Fi access impact patient outcomes. Recall, Value = Outcomes / Cost. So what must be considered is how patient perceptions and experience factor into outcomes. Whereas one might  subscribe to a stricter definition of did the patient get well? others might want to consider is the patient happy?

From a policy perspective, to what extent should we be using tax dollars to make people happy versus making them well? From a holistic vantage point we want to consider those two objectives part and parcel of a singular goal. But again that old bugaboo raises its head: to the extent we measure achievement of a holistic goal by using objective criteria to assess subjective reality we risk wasting resources chasing an elusive butterfly.

Of course, the real irony here is that public policy designed to incent market-oriented provider behavior that improves value maybe doing more to increase the denominator than the numerator of the value equation. Makes you wonder whether we would be better off to just let the market develop solutions without artificial incentives – or whether it would make sense to stop pretending that healthcare is an industry that could ever provide value for a broad population left to its own devices.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
  Sparky