New $4m grant on healthcare financialisation

A $4 million, five-year grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), through the National Institute on Aging (NIA), will support a new study, “How healthcare financialization shapes goal-concordant serious illness care.” The project builds on an existing programme of research into how financial pressures are changing healthcare in the United States.

The study extends earlier work funded by the Commonwealth, which examined the growing role of private equity in healthcare. This new research will look more broadly at how financialization affects nonprofit healthcare organisations, including academic medical centres.

Although these hospitals are not-for-profit, they face growing pressure to increase revenue, expand their services, and consolidate through mergers and acquisitions. They may also adopt business practices that are more commonly associated with profit-making organisations. The study will examine how these changes affect the way serious illness care is organised and delivered.

In particular, the research will explore whether financial pressures can make it harder for healthcare providers to deliver care that reflects what patients want and value when they are seriously ill.

The project will provide new evidence on how financialisation is changing the U.S. healthcare system and what this means for patients, clinicians, and the quality of care.

The work will be led by Dr Elizabeth Dzeng, who is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cicely Saunders Institute, an Associate Professor of Medicine and Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health.