The effect of physician-owned surgicenters on hospital outpatient surgery.

Hospitals increasingly find themselves subject to competition from freestanding outpatient treatment facilities such as diagnostic imaging centers and ambulatory surgery centers. That competition causes hospitals particularly intense concern when the freestanding facility is owned by physicians who are on the hospital's medical staff. We find some basis for that concern. Further, this particular form of rivalry raises competitive complications that differentiate it from the standard antitrust analysis of new competitive entry.