Hospital advertising can trigger increased emergency admissions and care from Medicare beneficiaries, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania says.
The January 2026 study (PDF) used Nielsen’s “Ad Intel” database and traditional Medicare claims nationally, excluding Alaska, from January 2015 through November 2016. Since the dataset applied to ads ran during the 2016 presidential election, researchers found political advertising “modestly suppresses” Medicare hospital care spending due to the “negative impact on hospitals’ own advertising.”
Seven types of costs and care were analyzed, including emergency department visits and inpatient stays.
The study was the “first comprehensive analysis” on hospital advertising using national data and found a “modest” effect on patient volume and inpatient care spending from ads. Results could not discern whether ads swayed patients from visiting competitors or whether patients would have otherwise not visited a hospital.
Pharmaceutical ads remain the highest share of healthcare advertising, but hospital ads accounted for $1.4 billion of advertising in 2016—an increase of 258% since 1997, researchers wrote, citing a 2019 study.
Researchers found that a 10% increase in hospital ads in a regional market, in turn, increased hospital admissions by nine admissions per 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries. Inpatient stays resulting from emergency department visits were also “slightly more responsive” to the advertising.
“The results on inpatient and outpatient care collectively suggest that hospital advertising draws patients to the ED who otherwise would not have used hospital services,” researchers wrote. “This could occur if, for example, advertising persuades elderly individuals to prefer the hospital ED instead of going to an urgent care clinic.”
While for-profit hospitals saw higher outpatient Medicare volumes and payments, researchers used readmission rates to determine that patients did not seek higher- or lower-quality hospitals from ads.
“It seems like patients are not worse off,” said Atul Gupta, Ph.D., one of the study’s authors, in a statement. “That’s the most important thing.”
However, researchers note that if advertising influences patients to utilize “costly ED care” rather than alternatives, it may “represent inefficient care, and use of taxpayer dollars in the case of Medicare.”
Consequently, according to researchers, there is a need to “comprehensively examine the impact on patient welfare,” though it was out of the study’s scope. Another area for future study is the effect of advertising on other groups, such as privately insured patients.