Mariah Taylor

In eight years, the share of physicians working for hospitals nearly doubled due to hospital acquisitions of physician practices — and with it came rising prices, a recent study found.

The study, published in July 2025 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, analyzed hospital acquisitions of physician practices between 2008 and 2016. Using data and machine learning algorithms, researchers identified a large number of integration events spanning different competitive circumstances. These were merged with claims data from a large national insurer to study the impact on prices. 

Here are  five findings:

1. Between 2008 and 2016, the share of private physician practices acquired by a hospital rose by 71.5%

2. By 2016, 47.2% of physician practices were owned by a hospital.

3. Two years after a merger, hospital and physicians prices increased by 3.3% and 15.1%, respectively, with no “discernible effects on quality measures,” according to the study’s authors.

4. Price increases were larger among mergers that had a greater scope for foreclosure, whereby physicians’ patients bring their patients into the care of the acquiring hospital, and recapture, when insurers are forced to negotiate “all-or-nothing” deals with hospitals for physician services. 

5. Nearly all of the estimated deal valuations of physician-hospital mergers analyzed in the study fell below the Federal Trade Commission’s Hart-Scott-Rodino merger reporting thresholds.
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Press Ganey found higher scores in patient experience across all care settings in 2025, and a few metrics distinguish top-quartile facilities from the rest, according to a July 21 report. 

“Experience isn’t just a reflection of care — it’s the new frontier of care delivery,” Patrick Ryan, chairman and CEO of Press Ganey, said in a July 21 news release. “The systems that will lead in the next decade are those that approach trust, communication, and consistency not as soft skills, but as hard strategy. Our data makes it clear: when organizations embed experience into the core of how they deliver safe, high-quality care, they earn lasting loyalty and drive better outcomes cross the board.”

To compile its “Patient Experience 2025” report, Press Ganey used data from 10.5 million patient encounters from inpatient HCAHPS, emergency department, medical practice, and OAS CAHPS surveys across all nine American Hospital Association hospital regions. This data includes academic medical centers, and integrated and nonintegrated health systems. The analysis represents more than 2,500 hospitals and 490,000 medical office sites. To analyze safety, the company looked at the experiences of over 16 million patients and the severity of 452,000 safety events. 

Here are nine findings from the report:

1. Subpar experiences were often the result of lapses in reliability, such as unplanned admission, fragmented digital touchpoints and unclear communication. 

2. Organizations that prioritized safety, empathy and operational consistency into daily practices had higher scores in patient trust and outperformed their peers in experience and loyalty metrics.

3. Since the prepandemic baseline, set in 2019, patients’ “likelihood to recommend” scores have risen by 1.7 points in ASCs, 2.8 in medical practices, and 0.5 in EDs. 

4. Inpatient scores saw a 0.9-point increase year over year but are still 2.2 points lower than baseline.

5. Patients with unplanned admissions reported the lowest experience rating and were 16% less likely to recommend the hospital. 

6. CMS recently added “teamwork” to its HCAHPS requirements, which emerged as a top driver for inpatient experience this year.

7. Inpatients who reported feeling “very safe” also reported the highest “likelihood to recommend” scores at 85.3 — compared to a score of 34.6 among patients who said safety faltered. This pattern holds true for patients in medical practices, where scores ranged from 95.1 for those who felt safe to 35.3 for those who didn’t.

8. Practices such as bedside shift reporting, nurse leader visits and international interval rounding are most effective when used to prevent harm and improve trust-building, as opposed to score improvement. 

9. Health systems that integrated equity and patient experience strategies saw higher consistency across all metrics of patient experience and patient loyalty. These hospitals also had the smallest gap between patient experience scores across racial and ethnic groups and were 2.8 times more likely to rank in the top quartile for “likelihood to recommend.”

Read the full report here. 
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