BACKGROUND: Hospitals controlled by private firms, like many private sectors, will employ market strategies to safeguard their investments and increase the profitability of the services they provide. These market strategies not only determine their financial success but also influences broader outcomes, including health system performance and population health indicators. Yet, strategies that enhance market influence and profitability may at times diverge from those aimed at improving health outcomes. This raises issues around market power imbalances and concerns that hospitals could prioritise profits over health if forced to choose. This systematic scoping review sought to identify and synthesise scholarly evidence on the market strategies employed by private hospitals to expand and consolidate market power. METHODS: Titles and abstracts of 1,642 English-language articles sourced from seven databases were screened, with 371 articles assessed for eligibility based on whether they identified the use of market strategies within a hospital setting. Data from 133 relevant studies were extracted and analysed thematically using Porter’s ‘Five Forces’ framework. RESULTS: We identified 22 distinct market strategies used by private hospitals, falling under six interconnected strategic objectives: 1) reduce rivalry among existing competitors; 2) raise barriers to market entry by new competitors; 3) counter the threat of market disruptors and drive patient health service usage towards hospital care provided by the hospital; 4) increase hospital buyer power by exerting leverage over upstream actors; 5) Increase hospital seller power by exerting leverage over downstream organisational actors; and 6) increase hospital seller power by exerting leverage over downstream individual actors. Although international in scope, the United States accounted for over two-thirds of the studies included. This partly reflects the dominance of U.S. scholarship in these areas. CONCLUSION: The resulting typological framework offers a structured means of analysing hospital market strategies internationally, within and across jurisdictions. Additionally, it can aid the identification of pertinent public policies, such as those addressing merger control, unfair trading practices, and public procurement. This works to bolster policy-analytic functions that can be influential in rectifying market-power imbalances.

993483 Pharmaceuticals again ranked as the most profitable sector in the United States, topping the annual Fortune 500 ranking of America's top industries, released this month. The pharmaceutical industry topped all three of Fortune magazine's measures of profitability for 2001, making this decade the third in which the industry has been at or near the top in all the magazine's measures of profitability. The occasion was seized by critics of the industry as reflecting corporate greed. Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch, said: “During a year in which there was much talk of sacrifice in the national interest, drug companies increased their astounding profits by hiking prescription prices, advertising some medicines more than Nike shoes, and successfully lobbying for lucrative monopoly patent extensions. Sometimes what's best for shareholders and chief executive officers isn't what's best for all Americans, particularly senior citizens who lack insurance cover for prescription drugs.” Overall profits of Fortune 500 companies declined by 53% in 2001, while the top 10 US drug makers increased profits by 32% from $28bn (£20bn; €31bn) to $37bn, according to Public Citizen's analysis of the Fortune 500 data. Together the 10 drug companies in the list had the greatest return on revenues, reporting a profit of 18.5 cents for every dollar of sales, eight times higher than the median for all Fortune 500 industries, which was 2.2 cents. The drugs industry says it needs extraordinary profits to fund risky research and development of new drugs and to absorb the high cost of drug failures in clinical trials. The industry's output of new drugs has risen only modestly in the past two decades, despite a more than sixfold increase, after adjustment for inflation, in spending on research and development—to more than $30bn a year. In the past few years output has actually declined. Many industry supporters blame tougher scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administratio

PHARMACEUTICALS The pharmaceutical industry has been the most profitable industry in the United States … promise is the most general: it is the claim that increased competition in the health sector … medical corruption in the interest of patient welfare. denis G. Arnold is the Jule and Marguerite

A large and growing empirical literature documents that privatization, deregulation, financialization, and under-regulation of harmful industries are associated with adverse health outcomes in the United States. However, this evidence remains fragmented across sectors and rarely articulates a unifying causal framework. This paper advances the literature by integrating findings across health care, harmful-product industries, and economic and social policy to demonstrate that <b>corporate profit maximization functions as a cross-cutting driver of health disparities and premature mortality in the United States.</b> We synthesize evidence showing that profit-driven incentives shape insurance markets, hospital and physician practice ownership, pharmaceutical marketing, and the aggressive promotion of tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, opioids, firearms, and fossil fuels-together contributing to more than one million deaths annually. We further document how corporate influence over public policy has increased poverty, economic inequality, and discrimination, all of which are powerful social determinants of health. In contrast to sector-specific analyses, this paper presents a unified, systems-level account of how profit-first governance undermines population health. We conclude by describing how a social movement to achieve a single payer system that provides Medicare for All would not only vastly improve public health, it would be a catalyst for numerous other reforms that enhance the general wellbeing.

Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America … universal coverage in the 1940s, when President Lyndon Johnson proposed Medicare in the 1960s, and when … the four most important. The first is the pharmaceutical industry, which is comprised almost entirely

Aims to identify and explore recent legal and policy developments affecting the EU pharmaceutical business environment. Areas addressed are: the declaration of industry policy from the European Commission and the MEPs’ recent response to this, drug licensing, member state trade in pharmaceuticals, price and profit controls, and state aid. States none of these areas are quite so mutually exclusive, and that there is more to the EU pharmaceutical industry than just the drugs it provides and while there is a growing trend towards a single EU market in pharmaceuticals it is highly unlikely that a single market will be achieved in the next decade. Argues that EU policies must facilitate a strong, profitable, pharmaceutical industry. Regardless of how successful the EU pharmaceutical industry is, it is still behind the USA and looks likely to remain so. The EU as a pharmaceutical area is beginning to be eclipsed by newly‐emerging areas in the Fast East and whether or not EU governments have formal, explicit pharmaceutical industry policy, these governments will still affect the pharmaceutical environment. Concludes that the fundamental questions of any industrial policy must be carefully addressed.

UNDER MOUNTING PRESSURE from customers, regulators, and shareholders to cut costs and stimulate innovation, the pharmaceutical industry is taking measures that other major industry sectors started on five to 10 years ago. Business process reengineering, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and supply chain management—old news to chemical, automobile, and electronics manufacturers— are new obsessions among drugmakers. Industry watchers agree that pharmaceutical companies have no choice now but to improve efficiency throughout their operations. At the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing 2003 conference in Boston earlier this month, Michael J. Hathaway, a partner with IBM Business Consulting Services, noted that while the sector is still more profitable than others, important economic indicators now spell big trouble for drugmakers on Wall Street. Total shareholder return for the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, for example, has fallen 83%, and while the Financial Times pharmaceuticals indexrose 350% from 1993 to 20...

Pharmaceutical industry develops rapidly in both domestic and international markets as a profitable business. In this paper, the relationship between capital structure and profitability of listed company in the pharmaceutical industry is under discussion. In the context, we select 141 pharmaceutical industry listed companies as the research objects. Through the model and principal component analysis, we use the total score to assess profitability, then adopt multiple regression method for regression analysis. The research result shows: asset-liability ratio of listed companies is negatively correlated with the profitability in the pharmaceutical industry. The relationship between long-term asset-liability ratio and profitability is not significant. The proportion of professional major shareholders and profitability is related. Ownership concentration is positively associated with profitability. The consequence is probably conducive to regulate financing behavior in China and boost the competitiveness of enterprises. Some suggestions are submitted which help to improve listed company's ability in China's pharmaceutical industry to fight against risk. In addition, we hope it provides theoretical help for investors and other important stakeholders to make decisions. Therefore, the study of the relationship between capital structure and profitability appears to be of great significance for Chinese pharmaceutical listed companies.

Quality management is very important segment of business in pharmaceutical industry which primary objective is to provide a quality product to customer for the purpose of preserving human health. The increasing number of companies apply numerous quality systems, hence the need for a comparative review of quality management systems and its optimization in order to find suitable model for the integration of these systems. The improvement of integrated management and quality systems has become an imperative of company's business development and survival. It is economically acceptable to use synergy potential in the field of quality management for the purpose of significantly improving company's business competitive position with a relatively small investment. In addition to this, with the integration of different management systems companies become more agile, profitable and more competitive, which is a condition for its survival on the global marketplace. Integrated management systems combine all the components of management systems into a coherent system thus enabling the achievement of company's policy and goals. Basically, there are three approaches for establishment of integrated quality management systems: the Sequential approach, Parallel approach and Combined approach.

Growing research expenditure, regulatory framework and generic erosion have forced pharmaceutical companies globally to resort to pharmaceutical technology management (PTM). Indeed, the pharmaceutical industry has witnessed the impact of innovative drug delivery and device technologies and their influence on business. PTM has given a new business insight with greater profits and enhancement of product franchise. Promising breakthrough technologies have not been able to reach a commercial platform largely owing to lack of capital at the preliminary stages of the product development program. Intellectual property plays a considerable role in protecting innovative technologies. Joint ventures and strategic alliances also become important for commercializing a new technology. The synergy of PTM with options of in-licensing is expected to infuse newer opportunities to the pharmaceutical business.

industries – and in particular the pharmaceutical industry – have focused attention on regulatory regimes that impede their ability to sustain the cycle