Last year, the Lown Institute, a nonprofit healthcare think tank based in Needham, Massachusetts, reported that hospitals performed more than 1 million unnecessary tests and procedures on Medicare patients from 2016 to 2018. Unnecessary tests and procedures can put patients at risk of complications and drive up the cost of care. More
U.S. hospitals performed more than 100,000 surgeries on older patients during the first year of the pandemic, according to a new Lown Institute analysis. The healthcare think tank relied on Medicare claims data and analyzed eight common low-value procedures. It called the 100,000 procedures unnecessary and potentially harmful in a press release. It found that between March and December 2020, among the most-performed surgeries were coronary stents and back surgeries. More
For the ranking, Lown examined service use measures at more than 3,100 hospitals. Data in the ranking came from the Medicare claims database and spanned 2018 to 2020. Eight common procedures — including hysterectomy for benign disease, coronary stents for stable heart disease and spinal fusion for low back pain — were measured. Four tests were also considered. Hospitals with the capacity to do four or more of the services were ranked. More
Despite the risks posed by COVID-19, hospitals continued to perform eight common, low-value procedures during the first year of the pandemic at a rate similar to 2019, according to a Lown Institute analysis published Tuesday. More
The nation’s hospitals performed more than 100,000 unnecessary and potentially harmful procedures on older patients between March and December 2020, according to a new analysis by the Lown Institute. More
How can we ensure that nonprofit hospitals are paying their fair share? What policy avenues or partnerships have worked in the past? More
An investigation into the FDA's "breakthrough" device designation shows that devices are being approved based on little evidence, with high potential for profit to device-makers. More
Two-thirds of hospitals in the U.S. are classified as non-profits, yet there is a huge disconnect between the billions of dollars of tax exemptions that many of these institutions receive and how much of those savings goes back into community investment and charity care, as a recent study from the Lown Institute found. More
How often did hospitals perform low-value services in the first year of COVID? Register now for our Hospital Overuse in COVID roundtable discussion May 17 to find out. More
"There's sort of this conspiracy of silence in which everything goes along pell-mell, merrily business as usual," said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, which publishes research on unnecessary procedures. "Hospitals have no incentive to say, 'are you sure everything we're doing is needed?' Hospitals are in the business of collecting revenue, and so it's not that they're deliberately engaging in ripping off communities, it's that they have no incentive to try to be better, and they have plenty of disincentives." More