Lifespan and CNE Have Thousands of Vacancies - A Brown Consultant Says Merger Will Create More Jobs
GoLocalProv News Team
Lifespan and CNE Have Thousands of Vacancies - A Brown Consultant Says Merger Will Create More Jobs
The consulting firm Tripp Umbach was paid $90,000 by the University for the study.
“My firm was retained by Brown University to support economic and strategic planning related to understanding the benefits to the economy from closer integration with Lifespan and Care New England. The total fee for our consulting engagement was $90,000, and included funding to prepare the attached report," said Paul Umbach, Founder & President of the consulting firm in an email to GoLocal.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBrown has a vested interest in the mega-deal.
As GoLocal reported in February 2021, when the merger agreement was announced, Brown University committed to provide a minimum of $125 million over five years in support of the development of the integrated AHS with Lifespan and Care New England.
Mergers, Jobs, and Patient Care
According to the report, a proposed merger will have a number major positive impacts, including, “Creating an integrated academic medical center can significantly increase the economic impact of the academic medicine sector in Rhode Island from $8.2 billion in 2020 to $11.5 billion by 2035.”
This is the fourth time Lifespan and Care New England have entered into merger negotiations in the past two decades.
While the consultant to Brown outlines the benefits to the Rhode Island economy, there are a number of national studies that point to such mergers as costly to consumers and do little or nothing to improve quality of healthcare.
Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February of 2020 conducted by Harvard University researchers looked at hospital performance between 2007 and 2016, a period punctuated by several hospital mergers. They studied 246 hospitals that had been acquired and 1,986 control hospitals, looking at their performance in four categories: clinical process, patient experience, mortality and rate of readmission after discharge.
“The hospital industry has consolidated substantially during the past two decades and at an accelerated pace since 2010,” the study stated. “Multiple studies have shown that hospital mergers have led to higher prices for commercially insured patients, but research about effects on quality of care is limited.”
This study comes on the heels of a 2019 report in The New York Times, "Hospital Mergers Improve Health? Evidence Shows the Opposite" that found that cost increase and quality decreased when hospital groups merge.
"Martin Gaynor, a Carnegie Mellon University economist who is an author of several reviews exploring the consequences of hospital consolidation, said that 'evidence from three decades of hospital mergers does not support the claim that consolidation improves quality,'” the Times cited.
Umbach responds to Gaynor and Harvard's research.
“Yes, we carefully reviewed the studies you mention and even acknowledge in our full report that there is debate on this issue with some older studies showing that costs increase. The bottom line is that the healthcare delivery system in the future cannot support higher costs and integrated health systems will be forced (like in every other developed country on earth) to focus on cost reduction strategies rooted in population health and chronic disease management. This is why the majority of the growth in the Rhode Island economy will stem from private industry growth and research funding at Brown and teaching hospitals," said Umbach.
The study warns that the merger needs to be substantive. "Tripp Umbach cautions from experience with similar projects that efforts to achieve the economic impact estimates in the report through developing an integrated academic medical center must go beyond a signing ceremony. Realizing the economic impacts outlined in this study will require significant new investments, philanthropic resources, patience, commitment, and culture change," states the report.