Group Practice Size Consolidation in Emergency Medicine

Study objective: Practice consolidation is common and has been shown to affect the quality and cost of care across multiple health care delivery settings, including hospitals, nursing homes, and physician practices. Despite a long history of large practice management group formation in emergency medicine and intensifying media attention paid to this topic, little is known about the recent practice consolidation trends within the specialty. Methods: All data were obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Physician Compare database, which contains physician and group practice data from 2012 to 2020. We assessed practice size changes for both individual emergency physicians and groups. Results: From 2012 to 2020, the proportion of emergency physicians in groups sized less than 25 has decreased substantially from 40.2% to 22.7%. Physicians practicing in groups of more than or equal to 500 physicians increased from 15.5% to 24%. Conclusion: Since 2012, we observed a steady trend toward increased consolidation of emergency department practice with nearly 1 in 4 emergency physicians nationally working in groups with more than 500 physicians in 2020 compared with 1 in 7 in 2012. Although the relationship between consolidation is likely to draw the most attention from policymakers or payers seeking to negotiate prices in the near term and advance payment models in the long term, greater attention is required to understand the effects of practice consolidation on emergency care.