Style over substance

There's a new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that looks at the rising importance of amenities in hospitals (full text here). For anyone who spends their professional life working to improve the quality of patient care, this paper will drive a knife through your heart. According to the authors of this paper, patient surveys reveal that the nonclinical experience is twice as important as clinical reputation in choosing a hospital. Let's hope that hospital administrators don't start trading in infection preventionists for monogrammed bathrobes!