Consolidation and Mergers Among Health Systems in 2021: New Data from the AHRQ Compendium

Consolidation of health care providers into vertically integrated health systems continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in ever greater concentration in the U.S. health care system. Building on prior work, we examine new data from the AHRQ Compendium of U.S. Health Systems, a publicly available database containing information on U.S. health systems and providers. Among key findings from the recently released 2021 Compendium is the fact that although the number of systems changed little between 2018 and 2021, there was considerable churn due to mergers and acquisitions, and increasing physician affiliation with health systems. What is more, consolidation trends led to increased variation in system size in 2021, with fewer large systems at the top of the size distribution and the addition of new smaller systems at the bottom.

Read more about how the landscape of health systems changed from 2018 to 2021, highlighting key trends in system formation and their implications. Based on Compendium data from 2018 to 2021, we characterized systems in terms of their size, geographic scope, and ownership.