February 7th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in Medblogger Shout Outs
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Well, this conversation from the blogosphere gets my blood boiling, I can tell you! In a recent blog post about the ugly under belly of hospitals, I discussed how administrator salaries decrease hospital resources. Dr. Stanley Feld’s excellent blog post digs even deeper:
Paul Levy CEO of Beth Israel Hospital writes a blog called “Running a Hospital”. He has tried to justify his salary after the Boston Globe published his salary of over 1 million dollars per year…
Remember hospitals such as Beth Israel Hospital in Boston are tax exempt community hospitals because they have this community obligation. These tax subsides and others tax subsides are opaque to the public. However, the public pays for these subsides. They contribute to the hospitals bottom line and Mr. Levy’s bonus.
Linda Halderman M.D. wrote an essay entitled “How Much is Your Doctor Worth?”. It is also worth reading. The subtitle should be, “How Much is Your Doctor paid?” The answer after the long essay is $59.50 for a complicated office visit. [If Levy were a clinician,] he would only have to see 168,067 patients in one year or 744 patients a day to generate a gross revenue of $1,000,000 before expenses.
What is more valuable to the healthcare system? A CEO’s salary based on revenue generated incentives and fund raising or good quality medical care?This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
January 7th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in Opinion
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I used to believe, quite naively, that hospitals were depressing places simply because no one had noted the connection between environment and recovery. It seemed that white walls, antiseptic scents, and cork boards were somehow required of hospitals – and no one had bothered to imagine anything different.
I thought that the solution was fairly simple – get some creative minds to come in and make recommendations for change. So one day I called the chair of the department of interior design at Parsons School of Design and asked whether she might send her students to my hospital to consider how to improve our situation. She was intrigued with the idea – and we soon had an entire team of bright young designers measuring the floors and windows, considering the limitations of our square footage, and getting to work on some dramatic proposals for exciting change.
Several months later the Parsons students made a presentation to our hospital’s executive team, and this was met with great enthusiasm. We all thought that we were on the verge of an exciting breakthrough for patient wellness. But alas, in the end not a single design suggestion was implemented as our administrators told us that there was no money available for environmental improvements.
I found out much later that our acting CEO was making about ½ million dollars per year in salary at the time. All the while the poor patients had to recover in a grim void of sensory stimulation.
There is ugliness in hospitals – and it runs deeper than the white walls. As with many sectors, money is the deciding factor regarding whether or not something gets done. I think that hospitals should take a hard look at their white walls, and the white linings of their executive pockets and ask themselves whom they were built to serve.
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
