Private Equity-Owned Psychiatric Hospitals Might Be Safer?!?
A lesson in how not to write an academic paper
Oh my gosh, this newsletter has been investigating private equity and its role in healthcare for some time. Just yesterday, we read a paper in JAMA Psychiatry about the role of private equity in freestanding psychiatric hospitals. Oh my gosh, was it surprising? It was! However, unless you read it closely, it's less conclusive.
It has a catchy title:
Private Equity Among US Psychiatric Hospitals
The paper reviewed the data on every freestanding psychiatric hospital in the country. Every single one of them. There are 617, for those keeping track. Of those, 87 are owned by private equity. That's 14.10%. Shields and colleagues have the information available, publicly, on those hospitals.1 They found that the staffing ratios were lower in private equity hospitals, which probably doesn't surprise anybody.
Here were their outcomes, as enumerated in the paper:
Main outcomes were staffing ratios, national quality measures (restraint and seclusion rates, 7- and 30-day follow-up rates, pos…