The argument has always been that combining hospitals will lead to greater efficiency of care, will reduce prices and costs, and will improve quality of care and patient outcomes.

A recently published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at any improvement in quality of care after hospitals merged. (here) Multiple studies have found that merges don’t result in decrease prices (here), but the NEJM research is one of the first on outcome results after mergers.

The authors looked at 246 hospitals that merged or were acquired between 2009 and 2013 and compared them to 1,986 hospitals that submitted data to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Specifically, the researchers compared four outcomes – patient satisfaction, readmissions within a month of discharge, deaths within a month of hospital admission, and how often certain treatments were offered to patients.

Bottom line, quality of care based on these four parameters did not improve after mergers or acquisitions. It can reasonably be debated that the four outcome measures don’t accurately reflect patient outcomes, but they do provide a good starting point for determining the quality of care for patients.

As the government-run programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare squeeze provider reimbursements, it makes financial sense for hospitals to merge. Smaller hospitals face financial insolvency at an ever growing rate and larger systems have the ability to set monopolistic pricing.

Hospital mergers and acquisitions seem to be the wave of the future and may very well help stabilize hospital access in certain communities. However, the arguments of less cost and better patient outcomes should be very suspect.