Health Care Market Research Articles

Behavioural determinants of the healthcare providers in Ukraine: Focus on competition context

The development of the healthcare system is an important task for every country, given that long-term economic and social development is absolutely impossible without a healthy nation. Therefore, improving public health and ensuring that the maximum number of people have access to quality healthcare services is one of the state's strategic priorities. In this regard, the authors of the paper set a goal to establish how the reform of the healthcare system in Ukraine has led to changes in the behavioural determinants of healthcare providers and recipients in the domestic healthcare market. The paper uses such research methods as comparison, visualization, graphical data visualization tools, and statistical methods of data analysis. The study revealed that Ukrainian citizens got a chance to freely choose their physicians by signing declarations with them, which led to increased competition among physicians and other doctors and healthcare facilities; at the same time, the number of declarations signed with private healthcare facilities increased significantly. Furthermore, the developed econometric model allows us to identify statistically significant relationships between the amount of state funding and lifestyle and environmental indicators, which will allow us to improve the mechanisms and amount of funding in the sector, improving the health of the nation in the new competitive environment.

IMPACT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON SOCIETY: RISK AND CHALLENGES

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and act like humans. These machines are designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. AI technologies include machine learning, which enables computers to learn from experience and improve their performance over time without being explicitly programmed, and deep learning, which uses neural networks to process complex patterns and data. AI has applications in various fields, including healthcare, defence, transportation, education, and labour market, and its development has raised ethical, social, educational, and economic implications. The main objective of the study is to explore the literature on the artificial intelligence, its impact on society as well as challenges and risks posed by AI. Recently AI has been utilized in various fields. To cover various societal aspects, literature has been reviewed from various disciplines where AI is applied. These areas include healthcare, automobiles, education, labour market, defence, entertainment, computation, and security. These articles are retrieved from peer-reviewed sources based on the keywords suggesting the role of AI, forecasting & assessment of impact, behavioural & ecological aspects of AI, and AI's relation to employment. In this study it has been concluded that application of Artificial Intelligence has transformed the conventional ways of almost every area of modern society by bringing the significant changes in the industry, commerce, defence, education, labour market and healthcare services. But it has raised certain concerns also such as automation leads to job displacement and economic inequality concentrating revenue among fewer individuals. AI supported Autonomous Weapons to kill could cause mass casualties if misused. Hence the idea is both devastating and exciting and the application of AI should be carefully monitored.

Cognitive impairment and its impact on employment: A qualitative interview-based study involving healthcare professionals and people living with multiple sclerosis

BackgroundCognitive impairment can considerably impact the work life of people who have multiple sclerosis (MS). Cognitive symptoms are associated with an increased likelihood of unemployment, changes in employment and decreased working hours. This qualitative interview-based study aims to gather real-word experiences and perspectives from both people living with MS and healthcare professionals, to explore how cognitive symptoms are experienced in the workplace, how their impact is addressed, and what can be done to support people in managing and minimizing this impact on employment. MethodsSemi-structured, one-to-one interviews were conducted with people living with MS who experience cognitive symptoms, and with healthcare professionals working in MS care. Participants were recruited from a healthcare market research agency based in the United States. The data obtained from the interviews were subsequently analysed using a Grounded Theory method, in order to identify the core themes that form the basis of this paper. ResultsA total of 20 participants (n = 10 people living with MS; n = 10 healthcare professionals) from the United States were interviewed. Overall, 9 themes were identified from the raw data, which were grouped into three core themes describing the perspectives and experiences reported by both people living with MS and healthcare professionals: (1) The implications of cognitive symptoms on work; (2) Challenges in addressing cognitive impairment and its impact on work in MS care; (3) Strategies and support for managing the impact of cognitive symptoms. ConclusionThe real-world insights of PwMS and HCPs gained from this qualitative study show that a multi-faceted approach to addressing cognitive impairment and its impact on the employment of PwMS is required. Workplace adjustments can range from self-implemented changes to changes put in place by employers to accommodate the various ways in which cognitive symptoms may impact a person's work. This study provides valuable information on how people living with MS can be affected by cognitive symptoms in the context of their employment; furthermore, that preparing early when possible and maintaining a proactive approach to managing their impacts on work are important for maintaining a good quality of life.

Implementation of China's Zero-Mark up Drug Policy and Impact on Healthcare Markets

This study investigates the impact of China's "Zero-mark up" drug policy on healthcare costs, employing a research methodology that includes the screening and analysis of close and return data from hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance companies' stocks at five significant time points. The findings provide insights into the potential effects of the policy and offer recommendations for its improvement. The study contributes to cost control measures in China's medical insurance system, addressing the specialization and information asymmetry in the medical industry. The Zero-mark up drug policy aims to reduce healthcare costs, sever financial interests between medical institutions and professionals, and enhance management capabilities. By examining the implementation effects and proposing new approaches, this research provides practical implications for effective cost control in healthcare.

Examining how and why service quality fosters patients’ revisit intentions: evidence from Pakistan

PurposeDrawing upon the stimulus-organism-response model, this study aims to explore the impact of soft aspects of service quality on revisit intention through the mechanism of perceived empathy.Design/methodology/approachFor the examination of the hypothesized relationships, the study adopts structural equation modelling to analyse the data of 562 respondents (i.e. 281 family members and 281 inpatients).FindingsThe empirical results suggest that service quality increased family member empathy perception, which, in turn, improved inpatients’ revisit intentions.Originality/valuePast studies have focused on the roles of overall service quality. The authors have extended the literature by examining the specific but important aspect of service quality and its effects on emotional response. Importantly, the study explains that the affective reactions of a patient’s family, fastened with perceived empathy, have a central role in influencing the patients’ subsequent reactions. Moreover, the prior studies collected the data either from hospital employees or patients. However, in the present study, the authors used a unique sample (family members as well as patients) to have a deeper understanding. Thus, the study enhances the literature on the stimuli-response (i.e. service quality – revisit intentions) relationship in the context of service marketing in general and health care in specific. Important academic and managerial contributions and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Heterogeneous effects of hospital competition on inpatient quality: an analysis of five common diseases in China

BackgroundMany countries has introduced pro-competition policies in the delivery of healthcare to improve medical quality, including China. With the increasing intensity of competition in China's healthcare market, there are rising concerns among policymakers about the impact of hospital competition on quality. This study investigated heterogeneous effects of hospital competition on inpatient quality.MethodsWe analyzed the inpatient discharge dataset and selected chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), ischemic stroke, pneumonia, hemorrhagic stroke, and acute myocardial infarction (AMI) as representative diseases. A total of 561,429 patients in Sichuan Province in 2017 and 2019 were included. The outcomes of interest were in-hospital mortality and 30-day unplanned readmissions. The Herfindahl–Hirschman Index was calculated using predicted patient flows to measure hospital competition. To address the spatial correlations of hospitals and the structure of the dataset, the multiple membership multiple classification model was employed for analysis.ResultsAmid intensifying competition in the hospital market, our study discerned no marked statistical variance in the risk of inpatient quality across most diseases examined. Amplified competition exhibited a positive correlation with heightened in-hospital mortality for both COPD and pneumonia patients. Elevated competition escalated the risk of 30-day unplanned readmissions for COPD patients, while inversely affecting the risk for AMI patients.ConclusionsThere is the heterogeneous impact of hospital competition on quality across various diseases in China. Policymakers who intend to leverage hospital competition as a tool to enhance healthcare quality must be cognizant of the possible influences of it.

Profits over care? An analysis of the relationship between corporate capitalism in the healthcare industry and cancer mortality in the United States

The characteristic features of 21st-century corporate capitalism – monopoly and financialization – are increasingly being recognized by public health scholars as undermining the foundations of human health. While the “vectors” through which this is occurring are well known – poverty, inequality, climate change among others – locating the root cause of this process in the nature and institutions of contemporary capitalism is relatively new. Researchers have been somewhat slow to study the relationship between contemporary capitalism and human health. In this paper, we focus on one of the leading causes of death in the United States; cancer, and empirically estimate the relationship between various measures of financialization and monopoly in the US healthcare system and cancer mortality. The measures we focus on are for the hospital industry, the health insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. Using a fixed effects model with different specifications and control variables, our analysis is at the state level for the years 2012–2019. These variables include data on population demographic controls, social and economic factors, and health behavior and clinical care. We compare Medicaid expansion states with non-Medicaid expansion states to investigate variations in state-level funded health insurance coverage. The results show a statistically significant positive correlation between the HHI index in the individual healthcare market and cancer mortality and the opioid dispensing rate and cancer mortality.

Self-Pay Outpatient Mental Health Care for Children and Adolescents, by Socioeconomic Status.

Many parents struggle to find mental health care for their children, and many mental health clinicians do not accept insurance payments. The authors aimed to estimate the frequency and cost of self-pay psychotherapy and psychotropic medication management visits for youths and to determine how service use varies by family income. A descriptive cross-sectional analysis was performed among youths ages 5-17 years in the 2018-2020 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Specialist visits included those with psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and mental health counselors or family therapists. Approximately one in five of 13,639 outpatient mental health specialist visits were self-pay, with psychologists (23% of visits) and social workers (24% of visits) most likely to see youths on a self-pay basis. Use of self-pay care was strongly associated with higher income, but even families earning <$28,000 per year utilized some self-pay care, at a median cost of $95 per visit. Self-pay visits were associated with slightly lower clinical need than insurance-covered visits, although this measure varied by income. The self-pay market for child mental health care potentially exacerbates inequities in access to care by burdening low-income families with high costs. Incentivizing mental health providers to participate in insurance for larger portions of their patient panels, for example, by increasing reimbursement rates and reducing paperwork, may help improve equitable access to mental health care. To the extent that reimbursement rates drive insurance acceptance, the frequency of self-pay mental health visits suggests that mental health services are underreimbursed relative to their benefit to patients and families.

Punished for Success? A Natural Experiment of Displaying Clinical Hospital Quality on Review Platforms

The healthcare market struggles with information asymmetry, limiting patients’ ability to make informed hospital choices. Aiming to bridge this gap, review platforms like Yelp have begun displaying hospitals’ clinical quality data alongside consumer reviews. However, our research uncovers that Yelp’s introduction of maternity care clinical quality measures unexpectedly resulted in lower subsequent Yelp ratings for high-quality hospitals with insufficient staffing. Employing precise foot traffic data and transfer deep learning, we discovered that high-quality, yet understaffed, hospitals experienced a surge in patient volume, which strained their resources and diminished patient satisfaction, leading to negative reviews. This finding has significant implications, signaling the unintended consequences of revealing clinical quality measures, including potential financial losses for hospitals because of reduced federal funding. This research not only contributes to our understanding the dynamics of patient satisfaction but also, offers actionable insights for high-quality hospitals to mitigate the negative impacts of unexpected visibility on review platforms. Our research underscores the importance for patients to discern between objective clinical quality measures and self-reported subjective ratings in their decision-making process. This research applies machine learning and transfer deep learning techniques to healthcare analytics, offering a deeper understanding of the interplay between information disclosure, online reviews, patient satisfaction, and hospital management.

Markets and Medical Decisions

ABSTRACT This essay argues for two conclusions. First, clinical decision-making is not best thought of as analogous to the purchase of other services, such as car repair. Health-care decision-making is far more difficult, collaborative, emotionally fraught, and subject to cognitive distortions. Second, the provision of health care should not be delegated to unregulated markets. Unlike other markets, there is no reason to expect health-care market outcomes to be efficient or fair or to promote individual freedom, properly conceived. Markets may play an important role in implementing an allocation of healthcare, but they are not an ethically acceptable alternative to determining what that allocation should be.

Measuring Local-Area Racial Segregation for Medicare Hospital Admissions

Considerable racial segregation exists in US hospitals that cannot be explained by where patients live. Approaches to measuring such segregation are limited. To measure how and where sorting of older Black patients to different hospitals occurs within the same health care market. This retrospective cross-sectional study used 2019 Medicare claims data linked to geographic data. Hospital zip code markets were based on driving time. The local hospital segregation (LHS) index was defined as the difference between the racial composition of a hospital's admissions and the racial composition of the hospital's market. Assessed admissions were among US Medicare fee-for-service enrollees aged 65 or older living in the 48 contiguous states with at least 1 hospitalization in 2019 at a hospital with at least 200 hospitalizations. Data were analyzed from November 2022 to January 2024. Degree of residential segregation, ownership status, region, teaching hospital designation, and disproportionate share hospital status. The LHS index by hospital and a regional LHS index by hospital referral region. In the sample of 1991 acute care hospitals, 4 870 252 patients (mean [SD] age, 77.7 [8.3] years; 2 822 006 [56.0%] female) were treated, including 11 435 American Indian or Alaska Native patients (0.2%), 129 376 Asian patients (2.6%), 597 564 Black patients (11.9%), 395 397 Hispanic patients (7.8), and 3 818 371 White patients (75.8%). In the sample, half of hospitalizations among Black patients occurred at 235 hospitals (11.8% of all hospitals); 878 hospitals (34.4%) exhibited a negative LHS score (ie, admitted fewer Black patients relative to their market area) while 1113 hospitals (45.0%) exhibited a positive LHS (ie, admitted more Black patients relative to their market area); of all hospitals, 79.4% exhibited racial admission patterns significantly different from their market. Hospital-level LHS was positively associated with government hospital status (coefficient, 0.24; 95% CI, 0.10 to 0.38), while New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois; and Detroit, Michigan, hospital referral regions exhibited the highest regional LHS measures, with hospital referral region LHS scores of 0.12, 0.16, and 0.21, respectively. In this cross-sectional study, a novel measure of LHS was developed to quantify the extent to which hospitals were admitting a representative proportion of Black patients relative to their market areas. A better understanding of hospital choice within neighborhoods would help to reduce racial inequities in health outcomes.

Private equity in radiology – Why aren't we more concerned?

There has been recent scrutiny of private equity involvement in the healthcare market by federal and state governmental agencies who are concerned about the corporatization and financialization of healthcare in the United States. Data is emerging that patient costs increase, quality of healthcare decreases, physician autonomy decreases, and physician burnout and moral injury increases when corporate interests like private equity enter the medical market. Like other medical specialties, the field of radiology has been affected by corporatization and radiologists should understand how private equity interests may affect individual radiologists and the radiology workforce on a larger scale.

Perception of dentists toward over-the-counter or nonprescription dental products: A questionnaire-based survey

Introduction: The oral health-care market has been one of the leaders in research on the chemistry and biology of the mouth, fostering the development of various oral care products that have significantly enhanced the lives of millions of people around the globe. Considering the many choices of over-the-counter (OTC) products available in the marketplace, it is increasingly difficult to select the proper products. Therefore, it is crucial to comprehend the many characteristics of these OTC dental medications. Aim: The aim of this study was to assess the perception and preference of dentists toward OTC or nonprescription dental products using a questionnaire. Materials and Methods: A questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey was conducted to assess the perception among dental surgeons regarding OTC dental products. One hundred and two filled questionnaires were received from various dentists through Google Forms. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: A total of 102 filled questionnaires were received and analyzed using descriptive statistics. 27.5% of dental surgeons recommended toothbrushes and mouthwash for daily oral hygiene maintenance. 85% recommended mouthwash based on clinical experience with 53% preferring it to maintain gingival health. 89.2% thought that companies misinform people about their products, which sometimes leads to problems such as dental abrasion, gum recession, and hypersensitivity, and 94.1% believed that more stringent regulation should be made to control unscientific publicity of these products. Conclusion: Most of the dental surgeons recommended the use of OTC dental products based on clinical experience and the specific indication for underlying disease. The preferred products included toothpaste, toothbrushes, mouthwash, interdental cleaning aids, and herbal products. The majority of dentists thought that the indiscriminate use of OTC dental products could lead to dental abrasion and gum problems, so strict regulation on the sale of such products should be done.

Maximizing Artificial Intelligence for Patient Satisfaction: Marketing Strategies in The Digital Health Era

&lt;div&gt;&lt;table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="left"&gt;&lt;tbody&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td align="left" valign="top"&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has catalyzed transformative changes in the healthcare sector, highlighting the need to optimize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve patient satisfaction. This research examines the role of AI in revolutionizing the healthcare market and its potential to improve patient outcomes. Using a systematic literature review, we collected and analyzed studies published from 2017 to 2022 from various databases such as ProQuest, Science Direct, PubMed, CINAHL, and Scopus, focusing on AI applications in healthcare and its impact on patient satisfaction. Inclusion criteria for the initial screening were articles that were freely available in full text, had open access, and were published in English or Indonesian, as well as ensuring no duplication in the records found. Significant findings were synthesized through thematic and descriptive analysis to ascertain the efficacy of AI in patient care. Of the 25 articles relevant for further evaluation, 12 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the qualitative analysis. The chosen methodology allowed the authors to conduct a comprehensive and systematic review. A practical suggestion that can be drawn from these findings is the importance of investing in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. This requires adequate training for staff to understand and use these technologies effectively. In addition, healthcare institutions should ensure that the use of AI remains compliant with applicable privacy and ethical regulations. Collaboration between various parties such as healthcare institutions, technology providers, and researchers is also necessary to accelerate innovation and knowledge exchange. By utilizing real-time data analysis powered by AI, healthcare can be improved, and governments can support innovation in AI by providing incentives, supportive regulations, and adequate research funding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt; &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Digital Transformation, Healthcare Revolution, Patient Satisfaction, Service Optimization&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Comprehending Qualifying Payment Amount (QPA) and the No Surprise Act in Healthcare

Purpose: This article investigates the No Surprise Act, a pivotal piece of legislation designed to protect consumers from unexpected out-of-network healthcare charges, emphasizing the Qualifying Payment Amount (QPA) mechanism.&#x0D; Methodology: Through a comprehensive literature review, analysis of legislative texts, and examination of case studies, this study elucidates the Act's origins, objectives, and operational framework of the QPA. It also explores the challenges of implementing the Act, its impact on various stakeholders (patients, healthcare providers, and insurers), and the broader implications for the U.S. healthcare system. Despite its intentions to curb surprise billing practices, the No Surprise Act and its QPA component face several implementation challenges, including administrative burdens, disputes over payment calculations, and unintended consequences on insurance premiums and healthcare market dynamics. This article leverages recent data, expert opinions, and comparative analysis with other healthcare models to provide a nuanced evaluation of the Act's effectiveness and areas for improvement.&#x0D; Findings: The findings suggest that while the No Surprise Act represents a significant step forward in patient financial protection, ongoing adjustments and policy refinements are essential for achieving its intended outcomes without compromising the sustainability of healthcare providers and insurers.&#x0D; Unique Contributor to Theory, Policy and Practice: Study and policy recommendations aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue and efforts to enhance patient protection and healthcare affordability in the U.S., ensuring that the No Surprise Act lives up to its promise and potential..

Does Higher Price Transparency Imply Lower Prices and Less Price Dispersion in Healthcare Markets? An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Compliance with the Hospital Price Transparency Final Rule in the Greater Los Angeles Area

&lt;p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14pt;"&gt;The Hospital Price Transparency Final Rule aims at reducing the cost of healthcare in the United States by making information about the prices of medical services more readily available to market participants. The economic rationale is that higher price transparency should reduce the level and the dispersion of prices by disincentivizing hospitals from charging higher prices than possible. Using data on 3789 prices for three diagnostic imaging procedures and on the compliance with the rule for 86 acute care hospitals in the Greater Los Angeles area, we test the hypothesis that price levels and price dispersion are lower among hospitals that are more compliant. We do not reject this hypothesis, although we do not observe strictly decreasing relationships in all analyses. Prices are lower at hospitals with high or medium compliance than at hospitals with low compliance, but there is not a clear difference between hospitals with high and hospitals with medium compliance. Prices are less dispersed among hospitals with high compliance than among hospitals with low compliance, but the evidence for hospitals with medium compliance is less clear. We conclude that high compliance with the Hospital Price Transparency Final Rule implies lower prices and less price dispersion among hospitals.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Customer search strategies of entrepreneurial telehealth firms – how effective is effectuation?

PurposeThe demand for healthcare innovation is increasing, and not much is known about how entrepreneurial firms search for and sell to customers in the highly regulated and complex healthcare market. Drawing on effectuation perspectives, we explore how entrepreneurial digital healthcare firms with disruptive innovations search for early customers in the healthcare sector.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a qualitative, longitudinal multiple-case design of four entrepreneurial Nordic telehealth firms. In-depth interviews were conducted with founders and senior managers over a period of 27 months.FindingsWe find that when customer buying conditions are highly flexible, case firms use effectual logic to generate customer demand for disruptive innovations. However, under constrained buying conditions firms adopt a more causal approach to customer search.Practical implicationsManagers need to gain a deep understanding of target buying environments when searching for customers. In healthcare sector markets, the degree of flexibility customers have over buying can constrain them from engaging in demand co-creation. In particular, healthcare customer access to funding streams can be a key determinant of customer flexibility.Originality/valueWe contribute to effectuation literature by illustrating how customer buying conditions influence decision-making logics of entrepreneurial firms searching for customers in the healthcare sector. We contribute to entrepreneurial resource search literature by illustrating how entrepreneurial firms search for customers beyond their networks in the institutionally complex healthcare sector.

Activating Northwell Health’s brand purpose through Movement Thinking

Can purpose be a business catalyst? Some believe that purpose comes at the expense of performance, particularly when markets go through difficult cycles. Northwell Health has found that purpose can drive performance and can open up brand frontiers it had not anticipated. By differentiating its business in the hyper-competitive New York healthcare market, Northwell is seeing higher recall rates for advertising, higher consideration levels for services, and historic highs in likelihood to recommend and net promoter scores. Purpose can absolutely drive business performance. This paper describes the value of Movement Thinking to help get a brand purpose off the page and into the world. The paper presents Northwell’s movement journey as an illustrative case study and close with seven concrete steps that brands may use in charting a movement journey of their own.

An NLP-based system for modulating virtual experiences using speech instructions

The application of virtual reality (VR) technology in rehabilitation is a research area that has been attracting remarkable attention recently, especially as an intervention with learning and developmental disorders such as dyslexia and autism. Multi-modal VR-based rehabilitative systems can provide a rich experience to patients by responding to various types of bio-signals. This paper proposes a framework for incorporating voice input in rehabilitative games. The proposed framework equips collaborative learning environments with voice based interaction which allows for a more dynamic flow of therapy sessions between physically impaired patients and specialists in a rehabilitative VR environment. The proposed framework’s pipeline begins with a speech recognition module to parse utterances into sentences. Next, comes the feature extraction module to identify the intent of the user and entities as well. Finally, we modulate the 3D environment in Unity. The framework was designed in a way that guarantees smooth integration with any game or 3D environment. Several technologies were tested in terms of accuracy and speed to increase the overall performance of the pipeline. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first to do the following: 1) build a dataset of instructions, inspired by a product already used in the healthcare market, 2) based on which we could realize a multi-modal system, with voice as one of the modalities, for the context of VR-based rehabilitation. We evaluate every stage in the system pipeline, and we show that we can achieve considerable results on each of these stages including the speech recognition module, with a 5.64% word error rate, and on intent classification where the BiLSTM model outperforms BERT in the Named Entity Recognition by 11% in terms of the F1-score. We envisage the proposed system to lend itself well to emerging healthcare frameworks in the Metaverse.

Practice Consolidation Among US Medical Oncologists, 2015-2022.

Health care consolidation has significantly affected cancer care delivery, with oncology practices undergoing substantial consolidation over the past two decades. This study investigates practice consolidation trends among medical oncologists (MOs), factors associated with consolidation, and changes in MO geographic distribution. Medicare data from 2015 to 2022 were used to assess MO practice consolidation in hospital referral regions (HRRs), linked with regional health care market data and physician demographics. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) was used to measure consolidation, and the Gini coefficient was used to measure MO distribution across counties. Multivariable linear regression explored factors associated with MO practice consolidation. Between 2015 and 2022, the number of MOs increased by 14.5% (11,727-13,433), whereas the number of MO practices decreased by 18.0% (2,774-2,276). The mean number of MOs per practice increased by 40% (4.26-5.95; P < .001). The percentage of MOs in small practices decreased, whereas larger practices saw an increase. MO consolidation, as indicated by the HHI, increased by 9% (median HHI, 0.3204-0.3480). HRRs with higher baseline hospital consolidation and more hospital beds per capita were more likely to have MO practice consolidation. Despite MO practice consolidation, the county-level distribution of MOs did not change substantially. On the basis of Federal Trade Commission classifications, MO practices were highly concentrated in 2015 and consolidated even further by 2022. While distribution of MOs at the county level remained stable, further research is needed to assess the effects of rapid consolidation on cancer care cost, quality, and access. These data have important implications for policymakers and payers as they design programs that ensure high-quality, affordable cancer care.