Dive Brief:
- As providers spend billions in physical plant renovations, a new study reveals that patients couldn't care less, according to a report in Kaiser Health News.
- The study, published in this month's Journal of Hospital Medicine, counters the conventional wisdom that hotel-style facilities will translate into better patient satisfaction ratings. The study focused on Baltimore's Johns Hopkins facility, which boasts the $1.1-billion Sheikh Zayed Tower and Charlotte Bloomberg Children's Center. Study author Dr. Zishan Siddiqui surveyed patients from the new building, as well as the decades-old adjacent Johns Hopkins building.
- Using standard Medicare patient questionnaires to ask patients to rate their care in both facilities, Siddiqui discovered that patients' assessments of the quality of the clinical care they received did not vary between the buildings. Patients cared most about the clinical aspects of their visit, paying little to no attention to their physical surroundings.
Dive Insight:
There is value to some of the changes being introduced in some of these facilities. For example, smoked windows that can be clear or switched off for privacy are better than curtains, which are persistent carriers of bacteria and hospital-borne infections. And creating buildings that are designed to reduce the amount of time it takes for nurses and physicians to get from their offices and stations to patient rooms is a productive change.
However, those are not the only changes being made, and the luxury hotel fixtures designed into some new facilities are adding billions to construction and renovation costs that will inevitably be passed on to patients in some way. The justification to this point, at least in part, has been to appeal to patient sensibilities when they fill out those forms evaluating their stay. But this study sends the clear message that patients don't care if they are treated in a standard hospital or a hotel-casino. They only care if they get the best care possible from the clinicians on the floor.
It's worth taking this study with a grain of salt. Johns Hopkins is only one provider, so this is a really small sample size.