• The construction and operation of specialty hospitals has tripled from 31 hospitals in 1997 to 113 in 2003.
• Concerns about this rapid growth resulted in an 18- month moratorium in construction of new physicianand investor-owned facilities as part of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003

Note: General Accounting Office defines the specialty hospital as a facility in which the diagnoses of two-thirds of its Medicare patients fall into no more than two major classifications according to the diagnosis-related-group (DRG) system (e.g., diseases of the circulatory system), of those in which no more than two-thirds of its Medicare patients were classified into surgical DRGs. The GAO also further classified the hospitals to meet five types of specialty hospitals: Cardiac, Orthopedic, Surgical, Women's, Other.
Source: Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (2005a)