Hospital markets in the United States, 2007-2017.

Background: U.S. hospital markets have undergone consolidation in recent decades with the growth of large "health systems," but little is known about the characteristics of systems, and whether certain geographic areas or service types (e.

Trends in acquisitions of physician practices and subsequent clinical integration: A mixed methods study.

Rationale, Aims, And Objectives: The US health care system is marked by a high degree of fragmentation in both delivery and financing. Some evidence suggests that attempts to reduce fragmentation have led to significant provider consolidation, including hospital acquisitions of physician groups, or "vertical integration." The objective was to use time-series data to quantify trends in and characteristics of hospital acquisitions of physician practices.

Provider-Offered Medicare Advantage Plans: Recent Growth And Care Quality.

Hospitals and health systems are increasingly offering their own insurance products, a type of consolidation known as "vertical integration." The relationship between plan-provider vertical integration and quality of care has not been examined extensively or over time. We created a new data set of all vertically integrated Medicare Advantage contracts operating in the period 2011-15 and tracked their characteristics and quality over time.

Recent Growth In Medicare Advantage Enrollment Associated With Decreased Fee-For-Service Spending In Certain US Counties.

Recent increases in Medicare Advantage enrollment may have caused lower spending growth in the fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare population. We identified the counties of largest Medicare Advantage growth and determined if increased enrollment was associated with reduced FFS Medicare spending growth in those counties. We found that 73 percent of counties experienced at least a 5-percentage-point increase in Medicare Advantage penetration between 2007 and 2014, with the most growth occurring in larger and poorer counties in the Northeast and South.