Organizational growth, survival and death in the U.S. hospital industry: a population ecology perspective.

This article develops an analytic framework for predicting organizational survival, growth and death in the U.S. hospital industry. The population ecology perspective is used to identify the environmental conditions under which health service organizations with specialist or generalist characteristics will survive. Hypotheses derived from the framework focus on the particular form hospitals and multihospital systems will take, how they are likely to develop and the configuration of the health care delivery system under different assumptions about the environment.