The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

by Brian Alexander

the CHWC executives held another strategic planning meeting. As part of the “current state analysis” they were all trying to create, Patrick had been assigned to collect Ohio Hospital Association data on geographical hospital market share. All of them were concerned about “leakage.” How many people in their core market (Williams County, mainly) were leaving to buy services from competitors? That could mean Henry County in Napoleon, Hillsdale, Hicksville, the Mercy and ProMedica hospitals in Defiance, and the hospitals in Toledo and Fort Wayne, among others. Conversely, they wanted to know how much opportunity there was to nip some business away from those facilities, and, if so, what “service lines”—ob-gyn, radiology, cancer, wound healing, lab testing, and so on—they’d need to promote or establish in order to do so.