How do for-profits rank for quality in Switzerland?
Where do hospitals operated by for-profit groups Hirslanden and Swiss Medical Network (SMN) rank on two-year revision rates for hip replacements in Switzerland?
The answer: largely in the middle but slightly worse than the average, according to data from the Swiss National Association for Quality Development in Hospitals and Clinics (ANQ). Its data covering 140-150 public, non-profit and private for-profit hospitals shows two-year revision rates for hip replacements (arthroplasties) done from 2014 to 2018. The ‘raw’ rate of revisions-over-total is adjusted to account for age, gender, BMI, ASA-Score and ‘Charney-Klasse’. The average across all hospitals is 2.5%.
The 13 hospitals of SMN represented in the data did a total of 6,317 hip replacements in the period with an average revision rate of 2.9%. That is an average of the hospital-level figures so does not account for different size of facilities. Larger competitor Hirslanden’s 14 hospitals’ 7,220 treatments had a slightly better average of 2.75%.
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The best-ranking for-profit operators are independent hospitals: Geneva-based Hopital La Tour and Klinik Gut, both with a rate of 0.7% off 313 and 461 hip replacements, respectively. La Tour CEO Rodolphe Eurin is very vocal about putting quality and value-based care at the centre of his strategy.
Our visualisation of the ANQ’s data does not include a handful of hospitals with a 0.0% rate that had very low number of hip replacements – none of them were for-profits. There was also a group of hospitals bunched up so close on the ANQ’s chart it was impossible to identify them – the organisation has not yet responded to a request for the raw data.
The medical definition of revision surgery is surgery performed to replace or compensate for a failed implant (as in a hip replacement) or to correct undesirable sequelae (as scars or scar tissue) of previous surgery.
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