No association is found between hospital CEO compensation and the value scores received by the hospitals they oversee, according to a July 6 blog post in Health Affairs.
For the analysis, researchers with Arizona State University’s health policy center looked at 21 major teaching hospitals in the U.S. They compared total compensation for each hospital's CEO as shown in 2017 IRS data with each hospital's 2017 performance scores from the Medicare value-based purchasing program.
Even after adjusting for beds, the researchers found no link between hospital CEO pay and value. They even found the CEO helming the hospital with the worst value score reported pay that was twice as high as the hospital ranked third in value.
"It seems reasonable that no CEO should receive any incentive pay if their hospital achieves a value score in the bottom third of comparable medical centers," the authors write.
They posed some solutions: "Hospitals in the middle and top third could tier CEO incentives based on performance relative to their peers. Alternatively, an incentive system could be developed around the 'hospital value score per $100,000 of CEO compensation,'" they wrote.
Read the full blog post here.