HCFO Releases a New Findings Brief

The recent growth of physician-owned, single specialty hospitals (SSHs) has spurred debate regarding the impact of such hospitals on costs, quality, and community hospitals. To inform this debate and policymakers’ decisions regarding SSHs, Kathleen Carey, Ph.D., associate professor at Boston University School of Public Health, and colleagues examined whether SSHs were more cost efficient than competing, full-service hospitals. They conducted a longitudinal study applying economic models of efficiency to examine whether SSHs were more cost efficient than full-service hospitals located within the same hospital referral region (HRR). The researchers found that overall SSHs were not more cost efficient than competing full-service hospitals.

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