The health care industry continues to undergo unprecedented consolidation. Health care providers and payors alike have pursued a wide variety of integrative strategies to achieve efficiencies or other business advantages. The Health Care Mergers and Acquisitions Handbook is designed to educate the practitioner about the antitrust analysis of mergers and acquisitions within the health care industry. Over the past two decades there has been an extraordinary amount of litigation related to challenges of hospital mergers. Each chapter identifies and analyzes important antitrust issues governing such consolidations. Accordingly, the first several chapters are devoted to a detailed treatment of substantive issues peculiar to such mergers: an introduction to hospital merger litigation, describing trends in litigation and the way in which such mergers are analyzed; issues unique to market definition, including product market definition and geographic market definition; the competitive effects of hospital mergers, assessing the evidence necessary to establish a prima facie case in a merger challenge and the rebuttal arguments offered by merging parties; a unique rebuttal argument offered by merging hospitals that is treated separately due to its prominent role in hospital merger litigation - the role and significance of efficiencies in determining the competitive merits of such mergers; the potential applicability of the state action doctrine to hospital mergers. In addition to a substantive treatment of hospital mergers, the Handbook also addresses; combinations of health care management organizations (HMOs) and physician practice groups; the analysis used by the enforcement agencies when reviewing mergers of HMOs; antitrust issues posed by physician practice consolidations. The appendix contains a chart summarizing litigated hospital mergers.--

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

Hospitals merge to constrain costs and improve quality. Although hospital consolidation can yield substantial cost and qualitative efficiencies, it can also harm competition by creating market power. Can the agencies and the courts strike the appropriate balance between the quality improvements a hospital merger brings and the risk of market power? Can they assess the quality improvements stemming from the hospital merger and weigh them against potential anticompetitive harm? And, if yes, how? These questions are not easy. However, this essay raises and examines them. Exploring the seminal US hospital merger cases, it underlines that the agencies, driven by the belief that healthcare is not special, focus more on the mergers' impact on prices and less on quality. It concludes that the agencies, by narrowing their analysis to the price concerns of a hospital merger, disincentivize merging parties from bringing quality of care arguments at the heart of the merger analysis and health policy researchers from developing research examining hospital mergers' impact on quality. It suggests that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should issue guidelines explaining what quality dimensions it values most on the basis of the main objectives of the US healthcare system and how these dimensions can be balanced against harm to competition.