Cost-conscious patients are less willing to go to higher-priced academic medical centers for low-acuity care, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute report.
A May 2018 survey of 1,250 U.S. consumers found that 58 percent of respondents were not willing to pay more for primary care received at an academic medical center and only half were willing to pay more to receive specialty medical care at an academic medical center.
Forty-nine percent said they would pay more for specialty surgical care at an academic medical center.
"Increasingly, there is an assumption that the vast majority of providers provide a basic acceptable quality of healthcare; thus, as with commodities, price becomes the primary differentiator," Lilly Marks, vice president for health affairs at the University of Colorado and chair of the Association of American Medical Colleges, is quoted as saying in the PwC report.
The PwC report notes that academic medical centers are increasingly having to partner or acquire lower-cost community hospitals to overcome these challenges as volume of profitable, low-acuity services declines.
"The challenge for AMCs is updating their business models to be consumer centric while at the same time honoring their tripartite mission of medical education, research, and patient care," Gurpreet Singh, U.S. health services leader at PwC, told Becker's.
Access the full report here.
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