Dive Brief:
- At a recent panel discussion held as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival, healthcare experts argued that providers must accept the need for hospital closures and physician firings.
- According to Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove, one of the primary obstacles to healthcare accountability is the excessive number of hospitals in operation; Cosgrove noted that hospital occupancy is currently only 65%.
- Jonathan Bush, founder and CEO of health IT vendor Athenahealth, argued that patients and families should stop making donations to hospitals, which, he argues, may prop up hospitals that don't offer high-quality care.
Dive Insight:
There's little doubt that the healthcare system can respond with innovative, more efficient solutions when hospitals close. The problem is, what happens while they wait for the market to address the situation? For example, when Manhattan's St. Vincent's Hospital shut its doors in 2010, the neighborhood waited four years for an alternative medical complex, the Lenox Hill HealthPlex, to open in its place. If hospitals closed on a large scale nationally, there's no telling how long it would take for care to shift to meet existing needs.
While hospital closures may indeed be a good idea, it must be approached with caution and provisions made to address community's needs while capacity transitions occur. It's possible that public health authorities will need to coordinate this complex transition if it is to happen without leaving certain consumers—especially those dependent on critical access hospitals—without services they can reasonably access.