Nonprofit Hospital CEO Pay Averages $600,000, Study Finds

A new Harvard study pegs average annual compensation for chief executives at nonprofit hospitals at nearly $600,000 and found little correlation between pay and quality-of-care metrics such as mortality and readmission rates, Bloomberg writes.

The study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, used hospitals’ 2009 tax forms and other data sources to determine the salaries of 1,877 CEOs overseeing nearly 2,700 facilities. Researchers found an average paycheck of $595,781.

Executives at big urban hospitals, which usually have teaching components, were the best-paid, with a median salary of more than $1.66-million. Wages were higher at medical centers that had more beds and advanced technology and scored well in surveys of patient satisfaction.

Ashish Jha, a Harvard health-policy professor and the study’s senior author, said nonprofit hospitals appear to be out of step with health-care trends, as insurers and Medicare increasingly link payments to quality of care. “I was hoping that there would be at least some signal that boards are paying attention to these patient outcomes and rewarding their CEOs, at least to some degree, based on patient outcomes,” he said.