What Are They Doing?

Competition can be good and bad, but our focus is on what we're doing - caring for our community

How will Reading Hospital's trauma center affect us?

How will the St. Luke’s expansion affect us?

It’s what you’re talking about. At our employee forums, you asked many questions, some of which were answered that day, and others you’ll find answered inside this CheckUp. Some of the more complex questions are like those listed above, which deal with competition in health care. Is it good? Is it bad? The answer is yes, because competition includes both constructive and destructive elements.

What’s good about competition? When we compete with others to better serve our community and the physicians we partner with, we reach higher levels of excellence. Just a few examples: lower mortality rates, higher patient satisfaction, lower costs, groundbreaking life-saving technologies and services, and new locations to allow community members easier access to our services.

Competition is what drives us to be national leaders. Take our Magnet status for nurses. It’s an honor earned by less than 3 percent of hospitals internationally, and we’re among the elite. Competition also keeps us focused on our financial performance. As a not-for-profit hospital, we reinvest our entire net margin (or “profit”) into the community, allowing us to give high-quality health care to people in our community who are uninsured or unable to pay for needed services.

What’s bad about competition? Sometimes, it can lead people to provide misleading information about the quality of care they provide. Slogans make good billboards, but if they aren’t truthful, they can lead people to make unwise choices. Competition also is destructive when health care services are provided in a setting without proper support services. A Gamma Knife in a strip mall, for example, can’t help someone who might need emergency care or cardiac care while undergoing a procedure.

Another destructive side of competition that’s relatively new to our area is the advent of physician-owned, limited-service “hospitals.” These facilities may look good to investors, but they will lead to intense pressure on full-service hospitals that need resources to meet the extensive needs of patients everyday. These “hospitals” don’t have to care for people with complex illnesses who need care the most, but we do.

Why don’t we agree to stop competing and join with others? It’s a question we hear often. For one, doing so could violate federal laws that prohibit regional monopolies on health care services. For another, if we agreed to stop competing with one area hospital, what’s to stop the other area hospitals from competing against us, or metropolitan-area hospitals from starting services here?

What’s the bottom line? While people around us talk about competition, our focus always will remain on finding the best ways to improve the health of our community. If we continue improving our services and access and achieving superior patient outcomes at a fair cost, we won’t need to worry about competition. Instead, our competition will need to meet our high standards—and that raises the bar of care for the whole community.

Lou Liebhaber, Chief Operating Officer
CheckUp, February 2006

This page last updated 2/12/08 04:08 PM