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The Â鶹app’s Center for Studying Healthcare Markets is a new initiative aimed at analyzing local trends in healthcare market consolidation and their various effects on consumers. 

This four-year pilot program, funded by a grant from the New Hampshire Department of Justice and Its Healthcare Consumer Protection Advisory Commission through the Health Care Consumer Protection Trust Fund, has three primary aims:

• Evaluating Healthcare Market Trends – We will use data-driven methodologies to assess changes over time in hospital, physician, and insurance market consolidation in New Hampshire compared to surrounding areas and describe the impact of those trends on local healthcare prices and quality of care.
• Conducting Original Consumer-Focused Research – We will conduct several new research projects to examine the effects of market consolidation on various understudied outcomes like service line availability, health outcomes, and nonprofit community benefits.
• Supporting State Agencies with Data Analytics – We will utilize our expanding data infrastructure to provide insights to New Hampshire agencies as they shape policy related to healthcare market consolidation.

Policy briefs:

Hospital Market Concentration in New Hampshire

This policy brief provides an overview of hospital market concentration in New Hampshire. It begins by describing how the degree of market concentration is measured by a metric called a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) and how it is applied to local hospital markets. The policy brief then provides estimates of this HHI measure for New Hampshire’s hospital markets by examining the variation within New Hampshire and how the degree of market concentration within New Hampshire’s local markets has changed over time. It concludes by comparing the levels and trends of New Hampshire’s hospital market concentration to surrounding states and the U.S. overall.

Learn more about hospital market concentration in New Hampshire

Research papers:

Hospital Market Consolidation’s Effects on Advanced Electronic Health Records Adoption 

by Fahimeh Ebrahimi and Bradley Herring

We use a panel of 24,235 hospital-year observations from the 2008-2019 American Hospital Association Annual Survey and its IT Supplement to estimate regression models examining the effects of within-market changes in the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and the size of the multihospital system on the degree of advanced EHR adoption. We find evidence that consolidation’s reduced competitive pressure negatively influences the adoption of comprehensive EHRs and certain functionalities, while consolidation’s economies of scale and shared infrastructure across the multihospital system positively influences the adoption of comprehensive EHRs and functionalities.

Access this research paper

Contact:

Forrest D. McKerley Chair
of Health Economics
bradley.herring@unh.edu