Hospital Contact Associations, government agencies, and private organizations have influenced the development of healthcare and hospital through additional financing, philanthropy, and technological support. The role of Hospital Contact Associations is to support hospitals and help them to solve daily problems. It is not to “run the place” but to support patients and medical staff in the stress of being community members and in carrying out and undertaking the personal and interpersonal expectations that the hospital expects of them. (Devers 2004).
Government agencies stipulate standards and policies in order to protect both patients and medical staff from unethical and immoral behavior and discrimination. In many states, government agencies provide financial and technological support to hospitals and propose special benefit programs for medical staff. These policies ensure a positive climate and environment so important for hospitals. Special attention is given to research hand development (R&D) functions and special grants for promising scientists. The modern health care system is enormously complex, and the paperwork is maddening (Devers 2004). Standardizing claims forms offers one way to keep everyone’s blood pressure down and further increase access to health care. To simplify the administration of hospitals, consideration is being given to eliminating the distinction. Governmental agencies provide additional support for hospitals, including finance, technology, and new premises (Cutler and Berndt 2010). Besides population aging, many factors contribute to the increased utilization and more intense application of medical technology, including consumer demand for and the proliferation of expensive technologies, reimbursement incentives that encourage increased services to patients, the practice of defensive medicine, physician training which emphasizes consideration of patient needs separate from cost considerations, and a medical education system that encourages specialization. “Hospitals are like “miniature cities” that must purchase all types of goods and services. High infrastructure costs are also related to service delivery” (Nabers 2008).
Private organizations donate millions of dollars to public hospitals and provide them with unique and up-to-date technologies and medical innovations. Without this support, many hospitals will not be able to survive and provide adequate medical support for different patient groups. The problems of the existing system and the growing need to protect against the financial risk of long-term care raise many issues related to social insurance concerning the possible mix of public and private interventions that can best solve this problem. The U.S. health care system is oriented toward institutionally-based high-tech care, with, until recently, very little emphasis on prevention, primary care, and “lower-tech” rehabilitation and services that help people with disabilities to function as independently as possible. New emphases on “wellness,” the enrollment of growing numbers of elders in Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) which apply prevention and primary care strategies, greater reliance on rehabilitative facilities following implementation of payment system growing awareness of the importance of rehabilitation medicine for elderly persons, and the expansion of the community-based elder service networks, all have begun to move some care of elders out of in-patient hospital settings. Also, the treatment of the elderly in ambulatory hospital settings has expanded rapidly, another response to the prospective payment system (Cutler and Berndt 2010).
In sum, Hospital Contact Associations, government agencies, and private organizations support hospitals and help to innovate. Without financial investments and innovative technology, modern hospitals would be unable to resist economic pressure and survive alone. For Americans, the quality of acute care in America and the availability of medical technology are outstanding: hospitals succeed admirably in providing people with access to hospital-based, and other acute care services-that is, services requiring immediate but not long-term treatment.
References
Cutler, D. M., Berndt, E. R. (2001). Medical Care Output and Productivity (National Bureau of Economic Research Studies in Income and Wealth). University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition.
Devers, K. J. What is Driving Hospitals’ Patient-Safety Efforts?. 2004. Web.
Nabers, M. S. (2008). Government agencies spend $1 trillion on health care. San Antonio Business Journal. Web.