A comparison of contract-managed and traditionally managed nonprofit hospitals.
During the past five years, contract management of nonprofit hospitals by for-profit corporations has increased markedly. However, while a number of studies have been conducted on investor-owned hospitals and proprietary hospital systems, contract-managed hospitals have not been evaluated systematically. This paper reports a pilot study which compares a sample of 32 nonprofit hospitals under management contracts with matched hospitals uneder traditional in-house management. Although few major differences were found between the study hospitals, the findings indicate that contract-managed hospitals tend to offer a somewhat broader range of services, especially in the outpatient area, younger, more highly educated administrators, and show lower cost per patient stay largely due to somewhat lower employee-to-bed and payroll-to-total expense ratios and shorter lengths of stay.
D003284:Contract Services; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005376:Financial Management; D006075:Governing Board; D006739:Hospital Administration / Q000191:economics / Q000592:standards*; D006740:Hospital Administrators / Q000592:standards; D006764:Hospitals, Community / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D014481:United States