Should physician-owned single-specialty hospitals continue to exist?

Physician-owned single-specialty hospitals (SSHs) account for only about 200 hospitals out of approximately 5500 hospitals nationwide, and yet they are at the center of a raging debate. The ability of community SSHs to lower costs and improve quality while threatening the viability and existence of community full-service hospitals is at the center of the hotly contested debate. A review of prior studies on this issue does not reveal competitiveness in the marketplace between SSHs and community full-service hospitals. In fact, the debate on the relatively newness of SSHs creates a number of questions not entirely answered by the research, which prevents a real understanding of their value to society and thus a resolution of the raging debate.