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Hospital Geographic Expansion: The New Medical Arms Race?New Full-Service Hospitals, Freestanding Emergency Departments and Acquisition of Physician Practices Key Strategies in Hospital Competition for Well-Insured PatientsNews Release FURTHER INFORMATION, CONTACT:
The study found that many hospital systems are seeking well-insured patients beyond traditional market boundaries, both in prosperous suburbs or in nearby areas with growing, well insured populations. Key hospital strategies to expand into new markets include building full-service hospitals, establishing freestanding emergency departments and other outpatient services, acquiring physician practices, and operating medical transport systems—all aimed at shoring up referral bases and capturing additional inpatient admissions, the study found. “Whether these new hospital competitive strategies will raise costs, improve care or both is hotly debated—payers and competitors contend such strategies will lead to higher costs, while hospitals assert the expansions will increase efficiency, increase access and improve the quality of patient care,” said HSC Senior Researcher Emily R. Carrier, M.D., M.S.C.I., coauthor of the study with Marissa Dowling, a former HSC research assistant; and HSC Senior Consulting Researcher Robert A. Berenson, M.D., also an institute fellow at the Urban Institute. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute for Health Care Reform, the Health Affairs study is based on HSC’s 2010 site visits to 12 nationally representative metropolitan communities: Boston; Cleveland; Greenville, S.C.; Indianapolis; Lansing, Mich.; Little Rock, Ark.; Miami; northern New Jersey; Orange County, Calif.; Phoenix; Seattle; and Syracuse, N.Y. HSC has been tracking change in these markets since 1996. Other key findings from the study, titled “Hospitals’ Geographic Expansion in Quest of Well-Insured Patients: Will the Outcome Be Better Care, More Cost, or Both?” include:
“It is too early to tell what impact hospitals’ geographic expansions will have on patients’ access to care in different communities, the quality of care, and costs. In theory, hospitals’ expansion strategies could both increase and decrease health care spending…. Payers’ and policy makers’ most commonly cited concerns were that new and potentially unneeded capacity will raise costs. Hospitals frequently countered that their expansions are necessary and sometimes overdue responses to population shifts and that cost increases reflect their efforts to provide high-quality care, not the cost of financing their expansions,” the article states.
The Center for Studying Health System Change is a nonpartisan policy research organization committed to providing objective and timely research on the nations changing health system to help inform policy makers and contribute to better health care policy. HSC, based in Washington, D.C., is affiliated with Mathematica Policy Research.
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