Local hospitals that treat large numbers of poor and uninsured patients scored the best in a new national ranking that evaluates hospitals based on their commitment to equity, inclusion and community health. Meanwhile, hospitals owned by some of the area's largest chains, including Northwestern Medicine and Advocate Aurora Health, got lower marks from the Lown Institute, a think tank based in Brookline, Mass.
"As a business person, it makes perfect sense to go where the revenue opportunity is," says Lown President Dr. Vikas Saini. "If you say, go where the rich people are or go where the white people are, it doesn't sound so good."
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The Lown List of Independent Health Experts is a resource for journalists to find sources without financial conflicts for stories, facilitating more balanced health care journalism.
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What are safety net hospitals and why do they matter? In this latest edition of “Lown Hospitals Q&A,” Shannon Brownlee and Vikas Saini answer three questions about safety net hospitals.
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Pandemic relief money more than made up for lost revenues at some hospitals
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Congress sought to ensure that patients would not face costs connected to the virus. But rules are not always being followed.
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Industry payments can encourage the uptake of new medicines and devices in some of the most influential medical institutions in the country.
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A series of disasters shaped the FDA into what it is today. We need to make sure that this pandemic moves the agency in the right direction.
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Public health experts say that while companies may be legally covered, they still have a high degree of interest in showing a vaccine is effective. “For many drugs, trials are oriented to showing efficacy and a minimal level of safety, then our system allows them to be released into the wild, into the marketplace,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Massachusetts that advocates for health care reform.
If any of the current vaccine trials show high efficacy there could be political pressure to rush it to market to save lives and help return the country to normal. “We desperately need a vaccine. It would be a game-changer,” said Saini.
“So, what we face is a genuine trade off that is now being distorted horrendously by the politics. We may get a signal of efficacy before we get a signal of safety,” said Saini.
That presents a dilemma for whoever is president. "Trying to time good news results around Election Day for political advantage is not a Trump thing or a Biden thing. That’s what politicians do. And it’s been dirty business long before Trump,” Saini said.
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A new study finds that for-profit hospitals are spending the same amount proportionally on charity care as nonprofits.
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In New Orleans, hospitals sent patients infected with the coronavirus into hospice facilities or back to their families to die at home, in some cases discontinuing treatment even as relatives begged them to keep trying.
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Vaccine development and use depend on data-driven assessment of benefits and risks, first by regulatory bodies, and then more subjectively, millions of times over, by individual physicians and patients.
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"For any given individual in the short run, going to Canada is a decent solution, but it's not a systemic solution," says Dr. Vikas Saini, a Harvard-trained cardiologist and president of the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan healthcare think tank.
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Since the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic in early March 2020, there has been a deluge of articles describing its horrible effects on hospital finances.
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A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN, and a key White House coronavirus task force member was not part of the meeting when the new guidelines were discussed.
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A new hospital ranking by the Lown Institute finds that some of the biggest, most prestigious medical institutions in the country perform poorly on indicators such as inclusivity (defined in the study as the extent to which they treat patients with low incomes and educational attainment, as well as people of color), delivery of low-value care, and community benefit.
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As COVID-19 continues to spread, an increasing number of rural communities find themselves without their hospital or on the brink of losing already cash-strapped facilities.
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In this latest edition of “Lown Hospitals Q&A,” Shannon Brownlee and Vikas Saini discuss why certain hospitals on the top of the US News ranking don't come out on top in the Lown Index.
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What has been the impact of hospital consolidation, and what can we do to reverse the harm from health care monopolies? At the second in an Open Markets Institute webinar series, health care experts outlined some of the key steps forward.
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Infection control specialists are being deployed to battle COVID-19, but there are concerns the workforce is being stretched thin and hospital-acquired infections may be rising as a result.
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When nonprofit medicine and nitty-gritty capitalism mix, the potential for financial conflicts abound.
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