![]() ![]() One bad outcome Brovont hoped to avoid was related to “code blues,” urgent calls to help Overland Park patients whose hearts had stopped beating or who were no longer breathing. ![]() “The goal was to identify an issue before there was a bad outcome,” he said. Scheffler, a professor of health economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. There’s a reason private equity firms have invested in companies staffing hospital emergency departments, said Richard M. They use large amounts of debt to acquire companies, aiming to increase their profits quickly so they can resell them at gains in a few years. Private equity firms have taken over a broad swath of health care entities in recent years. EmCare, the health care staffing company that managed Brovont, is part of Envision. Two of the largest, according to their websites and news releases, are Envision Healthcare, owned by KKR, and TeamHealth, of the Blackstone Group. ![]() Today, an estimated 40-plus percent of the country’s hospital emergency departments are overseen by for-profit health care staffing companies owned by private equity firms, academic research, regulatory filings and internal documents show. Physicians who remain employed see that speaking out can put their careers on the line. A laser focus on profits in health care can imperil patients, they say, but when some doctors have questioned the practices, they have been let go. It is a growing problem as more emergency departments are staffed by for-profit companies. What happened to the medical director, a former Army doctor named Ray Brovont, isn’t an anomaly, some physicians say. ![]()
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