Patients served at academic medical centers have a better chance of surviving the health problems that brought them to those facilities.
Or so concludes a new study published in the journal Health Affairs. According to the study,
We examined more than 11.8 million hospitalizations in the period 2012–14 for Medicare beneficiaries ages sixty-five and older and found that, after adjustment for patient and hospital characteristics, high-severity patients had 7 percent lower odds, medium-severity patients had 13 percent lower odds, and low-severity patients had 17 percent lower odds of thirty-day mortality when treated at an academic medical center for common medical conditions, compared to similar patients treated at a nonteaching hospital. For surgical procedures, high-severity patients had 17 percent lower odds of mortality, medium-severity patients had 10 percent lower odds, and there was no difference for low-severity patients.
The study’s conclusion:
Taken together, these findings suggest that efforts to limit care at academic medical centers have the potential to lead to worse outcomes, as mortality rates for even low-severity patients seem to be lower at the centers.
To learn more, go here to see the Health Affairs study “Do Academic Medical Centers Disproportionately Benefit The Sickest Patients?”