The explosive growth worries Vikas Saini, a cardiologist and president of the Lown Institute, a think tank that examines quality, cost, and equity across health care. He said doctors are prescribing proton therapy in a gray area — they think it may be better for a patient than the cheaper alternative, but there’s no hard proof.
“Everybody knows the game: You get an approval, and you go out on the market, then you expand the indications,” Saini said. “It’s called indication creep, or scope creep.”
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"If we're ever going to get to the great health system that Americans deserve, we have to call out bad behavior," Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, said. "The Shkreli Awards are a mirror that's hard to look into, but we've got to do it."
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North Texas is no stranger to fraud and greed in healthcare. The Lown Institute, in its snarky way, has “awarded” two healthcare fraud stories from North Texas in its 2022 Shkreli Awards.
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“If we’re ever going to get to the great health system that Americans deserve, we have to call out bad behavior,” Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, said in a statement. “The Shkreli Awards are a mirror that’s hard to look into, but we’ve got to do it.”
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Lown Institute president Vikas Saini, MD, told MedPage Today that this year's list reads like "a tragic comedy of grift and profiteering." If the actions of these companies and individuals seem to be worse than in past years, Saini said that's because governmental agencies and media organizations appear to be "more vigilant in calling out bad actors."
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Amid a wave of intensified criticism of hospital CEO pay at large, one source continues to pay close attention to the ratio of executive compensation to worker wages at more than 300 health systems. That source is Lown Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that measures hospitals' and health systems' social responsibility through 53 metrics related to inclusivity, pay equity, community benefit, care value and outcomes.
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Because of its nonprofit status, Ascension avoids more than $1 billion a year in federal, state and local taxes, according to the Lown Institute, a health care think tank. Until the pandemic, Ascension was consistently profitable, earning hundreds of millions a year.
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While hospital systems focus on more lucrative adult care operations, often sacrificing pediatric care in the process, the consequences of such decisions are often ignored, Brenna Miller, a health communications specialist at think tank the Lown Institute, wrote on its site Dec. 5.
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The Lown Institute of Needham has long argued that hospitals perform way too many procedures it has identified as being low-value, meaning they offer little to no clinical benefit to patients and, in many cases, are more likely to harm them than help them.
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The Lown Institute calls for greater transparency and accountability.
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The Lown Institute Hospitals Index calculated “fair share spending” for more than 1,800 hospitals across 275 nonprofit hospital systems by comparing each system’s spending on charity care and community investment to the value of its tax exemption.
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