The pressure points inflicted by private equity ownership in health care extend far beyond Steward Health Care, and lawmakers have a long menu of policy reforms they can consider to erect new guardrails in a changing environment.
With a host of Massachusetts hospitals and communities' accessible health care put at risk by Steward Health System's financial mismanagement, state policymakers are starting to assess the threat of profit-driven models in healthcare and how the issue may be legislatively addressed.
Mass. policymakers seek guardrails for private equity involvement in health care wbjournal.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wbjournal.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
On November 15, 2023, in response to governmental concerns over quality of care and operations in nursing facilities owned by private equity companies ("PECs").
Objective To review the evidence on trends and impacts of private equity (PE) ownership of healthcare operators.
Design Systematic review.
Data sources PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, Scopus, and SSRN.
Eligibility criteria for study selection Empirical research studies of any design that evaluated PE owned healthcare operators.
Main outcome measures The main outcome measures were impact of PE ownership on health outcomes, costs to patients or payers, costs to operators, and quality. The secondary outcome measures were trends and prevalence of PE ownership of healthcare operators.
Data synthesis Studies were classified as finding either beneficial, harmful, mixed, or neutral impacts of PE ownership on main outcome measures. Results across studies were narratively synthesized and reported. Risk of bias was evaluated using ROBINS-I (Risk Of Bias In Non-randomised Studies of Interventions).
Results The electronic search identified 1778 studies, with 55 meeting the inclusion criteria.