By Christopher Garmon –
Over the past 20 years, significant progress has been made in the science of hospital merger forecasting, through the development of more realistic models and the rigorous analysis of consummated hospital mergers and other events. Economists developed new hospital merger screening tools from models of the negotiation between a hospital and a health insurer for the hospital’s inclusion in the insurer’s network of providers. Recent research has begun to test the accuracy of the new tools and the patient choice models upon which they are based. Continuing progress in the quest for more accurate methods of hospital merger prediction will depend on the development of richer models of hospital competition and the requisite data to estimate and calibrate them.
