A new study reveals that the paycheck of hospital CEOs is not determined by quality health care but based on the patient's satisfaction and the advanced technology the hospital has.
A group of researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston analyzed the records of hospital surveys, tax returns, costs and performance reports.
They also investigated the levels of salaries of the hospital CEOs in 2009. They also considered the size of the hospital, quality data and other information from 2008 to verify if these are the basis of the 2009 CEO paycheck.
Data from 2,671 private and non-profit hospitals provide salary information for a total of 1,877 chief executive officers. On the average, a CEO takes home $596,000.
The distribution of the pay grade however is widely spread. The lower 10 percent has an average amount of $118,000 per year. On the other hand, those at the higher 10 percent earned as much as $1.7 million.
The low-earning group is usually assigned in rural hospitals that are small and has no teaching functions. The higher earning group, however, are those assigned in the cities that have large capacities, advanced technology, and higher patient customer satisfaction rates.
Disappointed, lead author of the study Dr. Ashish Jha said, "I was hoping I'd see even some modest relationship with quality performance."
The hospital quality performance did not affect the CEO salaries as much. Normally, this could be measured by the productivity results from measures such as bed occupancy, in-hospital mortality rates, and efficacy of treatments.
"If you're going to ask doctors and nurses to be accountable, if you're going to ask patients to be accountable … then I think we should make sure that everybody's in, and that senior managers of hospitals also have a stake in insuring high-quality care," said Jha in an interview with Reuters Health.
The study was published in the Oct. 14 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.
