Nonprofit Hospitals Have Spent $7.8 Billion on Management Consultants. Nobody Can Find Any Benefit.

For any hospital chief executive watching the balance sheet erode, the pitch from a management consulting firm must be hard to resist. Here, the partners promise, are people who have seen every operational failure, every cost spiral, every revenue leak in the industry, people who can fix things (in a matter of months, they promise) what internal staff have struggled with for years. The consultants arrive with laptops and frameworks. They run workshops. They deliver decks. They leave with very...