Hospital capital investment is important for acquiring and maintaining technology and equipment needed to provide health care. Reduction in capital investment by a hospital has negative implications for patient outcomes. Most hospitals rely on debt and internal cash flow to fund capital investment. The great recession may have made it difficult for hospitals to borrow, thus reducing their capit...

The recent rise of specialty hospitals--typically for-profit firms that are at least partially owned by physicians--has led to substantial debate about their effects on the cost and quality of care. Advocates of specialty hospitals claim they improve quality and lower cost; critics contend they concentrate on providing profitable procedures and attracting relatively healthy patients, leaving (p...

North American hospitals have historically struggled to engage in prevention and health promotion activities because they have not been incentivized or held accountable for doing so. However, in order to be exempt from federal taxes, 3,000 non-profit hospitals in the US must now regularly assess the health status of the communities they serve, and take action to address identified health needs....

Objective Not-for-profit hospitals are required to meet federal reporting requirements detailing their community benefit activities, which support their tax-exempt status. Children's hospitals have long provided community injury prevention (IP) programming and thus can inform public health outreach work in other areas. This work describes IP programming as a community service offered by childre...

The responsibility of hospitals is changing. Those activities that were once confined within the walls of the medical facility have largely shifted outside them, yet the requirements for hospitals have only grown in scope. With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the development of accountable care organizations, financial incentives are focused on care coord...

This study uses 1995 1999 Contingent Workers Supplement and hospital ownership data from the American Hospital Association’s Annual Surveys to how the employer sponsored insurance market responds to changes in hospital ownership. A Nested Multinomial Logit model estimates a two dimensional choice set of availability of an employer based plan and participation in that plan. The model indicates t...

In this paper, we address a surgery capacity sharing problem with multiple hospitals, and formulate a model where hospitals who have their own capacity (the Operating Room) locally. Each hospital has several surgery teams facing random demands and seeks appropriate capacities to accommodate the demands, so that its total profit is maximized. We first study the allocation of available surgery ca...

BACKGROUND A study was conducted in 2006 to compare differences in objective quality of care measures among hospitals labeled "Most Wired"--a hospital or member-hospital of a health system listed among the Hospital and Health Network's Healthcare's Most Wired Hospitals for 2004--versus hospitals without that designation. METHODS Ten quality indicators representing cardiac and pulmonary measur...

In this issue of CJASN, Dalrymple et al. report the timely and potentially provocative results of their study comparing hospitalization rates among forprofit and nonprofit dialysis facilities (1). On the basis of their analysis of US Renal Data System (USRDS) data from Medicare beneficiaries starting dialysis between 2005 and 2008, they found that overall hospitalization rates were significantl...

As part of an ongoing multi-year project investigating hospital-based clinical pharmacy services, the variation in clinical pharmacy services among hospitals with various teaching affiliations was studied. Survey documents, completed by the director of pharmacy, were completed for 1597 hospitals, representing 43 percent of the nation’s acute care general medical surgical hospitals. Hospitals we...