But Kaiser Permanente is entering the home stretch in what's turned out to be a sevenyear drive to implement comprehensive EHRs, personal health records and related systems at all of its hospitals and clinics. The experiences of the Oakland-Calif.-based not-for-profit organization, which owns 431 medical offices and 35 hospitals plus a large health plan, provide valuable insights for others tha...

Several theories of nonprofit hospital behavior predict that nonprofit hospitals behave in the consumer interest and thus do not exercise market power. If these theories are correct, then antitrust enforcement of hospital mergers should be restricted only to those markets in which a nonprofit hospital cannot offset anticompetitive behavior by for-profit hospitals. In this paper, we measure a ho...

We develop a competition index for differentiated products oligopoly and apply it to assessing the impact of concentration on price in hospital markets in California. Our index, which we term LOCI, is bounded between zero and one and increases with the competitiveness of a market. We use 1992-1995 hospital data from California to estimate the impact of concentration on price using our new conce...

OBJECTIVE To examine the between-hospital variation of charges and discounted prices for uncomplicated vaginal and caesarean section deliveries, and to determine the institutional and market-level characteristics that influence adjusted charges. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Using data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), we conducted a cross-sec...

atholic health care finds itself within a rapidly changing landscape. In response, some Catholic hospitals and collaborative health systems are making structural changes. Some systems have decided to forego formal recognition by the local bishop, for example, while a few hospitals and systems have begun to explore for-profit corporate structures. These and other new models-in-the-making may hav...

BACKGROUND What is common to many healthcare systems is a discussion about the optimal balance between public and private provision. This paper provides a scoping review of research comparing the performance of public and private hospitals in Europe. The purpose is to summarize and compare research findings and to generate questions for further studies. METHODS The review was based on a metho...

BACKGROUND As safety net providers, public hospitals operate in more challenging environments than private hospitals. Such environments put public hospitals at greater risk of financial distress, which may result in privatization and deterioration of the safety net. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate whether financial distress is associated with privatization among public ho...

A s Congress and the Clinton administration move into a new round of balanced-budget wrangling, Medicare .\m\ hospital costs will figure prominently in it. To be sure, the number targets for total Medicare savings are lower this year than they were in 1995, but they would hit hospitals particularly hard. Although many analysts predict another stalemate—or at least no agreement until after the N...