During the 1990s, the hospital industry was transformed by mergers and acquisitions. This synthesis looks at why this rapid consolidation occurred and what impact it had on the price and quality for patients, and the cost of care for hospitals. Key findings include: Managed care was not a main driver of consolidation, but fear of managed care may have played a part. Other factors, including tec...

A Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) supply chain is modeled using discrete-event simulation. The supply chain consists of a supplier (vendor) with a manufacturing facility and a distribution center, and a customer (retailer) with a distribution center and an outlet store. The information shared between the retailer and the vendor is subject to error and delays. The impacts of sharing erroneous dat...

Prior studies find that the growth of managed care through the early 1990s introduced a strong positive relationship between price and concentration in hospital markets. We hypothesize that the relaxation of constraints on consumer choice in response to a "managed care backlash" has diminished the price sensitivity of demand facing hospitals, reducing or possibly reversing the price-concentrati...

Let us give credit to those pioneering funders and practitioners who have risked sacrificing the comfort of armchair critic status in favour of the partly successful but promising models upon which we can base our future successes. A decade after the early acrimonious engagements we now find clinicians on both sides of the table representing IPAs and managed care organisations — talks are still...