Dive Brief:
- In two new charts published in Axios, journalist Steven Brill compares the amount CEOs at the 20 largest health systems and other well-known U.S. hospitals get paid to the amount a patient pays to stay at one of their locations each day.
- Sutter Health CEO Patrick Fry gets paid the most per patient stay ($6.88 per patient day) among the largest 20 hospital systems while Greenwich Hospital CEO Norman G. Roth earns the most ($56.40 per patient day) among the other studied hospitals.
- Brill's analysis finds that the volume of patient stays does not always equal the highest executive pay check.
Dive Insight:
As clinicians continue experimenting with value-based payments with programs like the Quality Payment Program implemented by MACRA, hospitals' focus will likely shift to keeping patients healthy and outside of hospitals' walls. Thus, methodologies on how to evaluate how CEOs get paid per patient could also change.
Jeffrey A. Romoff, CEO of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, gets paid $6.06 per patient stay, Brill's analysis found. However, the institution has already started attempting to keep their patients from coming back to their hospitals by providing them with a kit of remote monitoring technologies upon discharge, Chief Innovation Office Dr. Rasu Shrestha recently told Healthcare Dive.
Hospitals could soon be rewarded for preventing patient stays rather than for filling hospital beds. More and more hospitals may choose to implement programs like UPMC's as health IT has already proven to help improve population health.
According to Brill, executives in the healthcare industry are currently paid far more than those in any other industry. On the other hand, an new analysis done by LinkedIn shows healthcare chief executives are not always the ones who earn the lion's share. Pharmacy manager is the profession that topped LinkedIn's list of median based salaries and anesthesiologists topped Career Trend's recent ranking of the professions in healthcare with the highest average annual salaries in 2015, while chief executives ranked at #9.