title: A framework for designing and implementing community benefit standards.
abstract: Increasingly, health care professionals and the public are asking questions about the role of the hospital in meeting community need including its not-for-profit tax status. This article reviews the community benefit literature, provides a framework for understanding how a hospital community benefit program was developed, and delineates through a structured case study the lessons learned from this experience. It provides the practitioner with a context in which other hospitals may replicate the program and gives researchers a substantive case study that may be used as the basis for the empirical testing of community benefit models. The authors also outline the many difficult issues faced by a typical community hospital as it attempted to examine and develop additional responses to community need.
authors.affiliation: Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Missouri School of Medicine, Columbia, USA.
authors.forename: D R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Longo
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Kruse
authors.forename: R G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Kiely
mesh_terms: D018672:Community Health Planning; D003256:Community Participation; D003159:Community-Institutional Relations / Q000191:economics*; D003237:Connecticut; D017144:Focus Groups; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000379:methods; D006788:Hospitals, Voluntary / Q000191:economics*; D006801:Humans; D017146:Models, Organizational; D012940:Social Problems / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D019464:Tax Exemption; D014481:United States