A 2024 awarded grant under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Data for Action program, managed by AcademyHealth.
This project is funded under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s research program, “Health Data for Action (HD4A),” which makes valuable data from unique data owners available to researchers to answer important research questions. The goal of the study is to investigate how private equity (PE) acquisitions of physician groups changed following federal price transparency regulations. Price transparency regulations may have reduced the costs and difficulty faced by PE firms when attempting to identify providers offering relatively low prices. These providers could be attractive acquisition targets for PE firms, because the firm could use the newly available average or typical market price as a reference to negotiate increases in the low prices of the acquired practices. Using Colorado All Payer Claims and Serif Health Transparency in Coverage data, the study will investigate the following questions: 1) Did the number or size of private equity (PE) acquisitions of physician practices change after price transparency? 2) After price transparency, were PE acquisitions of physician practices concentrated among low priced providers? 3) How did prices of acquired practices change following acquisition? 4) In Colorado, did PE acquisitions of physician practices become more concentrated among low priced providers after price transparency? 5) In Colorado, did price changes after PE acquisition change from before to after price transparency? The study will use interrupted time series and difference-in-difference methods to investigate these questions. Deliverables will include a project work plan and final narrative report. The researchers will also produce paper(s) suitable for publication and present findings at national research meetings and to other stakeholder audiences as appropriate, including policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels and other key stakeholders, as part of the deliverables for this grant.
Grant #81869
Grantee Organization: Duke University
Grantee period: 06/15/24 – 06/14/26
Christopher Behrer is a doctoral candidate at Duke University in Public Policy & Economics and a medical stude... Read Bio