Multihospital systems in the United States: A geographical overview

The American hospital industry has recently been experiencing the steady evolution of multihospital arrangements (various types of individual facilities under consolidated or cooperative management structures). The type that exhibits the most integrated structure is the multihospital system, here defined as two or more acute care hospitals owned, leased, or contract-managed by a corporate office. This paper examines some large-scale spatial dimensions of the 267 multihospital systems and their 1400 owned and leased hospitals listed in the American Hospital Association's 1980 Directory of Multihospital Systems. Multihospital systems are divided into two broad categories according to the kind of controlling organization, i.e. investor-owned and not-for-profit, and into another two categories according to their geographical dispersion: intrastate (in which all hospitals as well as the main corporate office are located in a single state) and interstate.