Introducing a Measure of Hospital Community Orientation

Policymakers have long sought to encourage hospitals to assume a more collaborative role in improving community health. By urging hospitals to interact with community stakeholders, more integrative relationships may result that can better address local health issues. This study establishes a composite measure of hospital community orientation, defined as the extent to which a hospital uses community resources and knowledge in its community benefit (CB) work, based on an expansion of CB regulations that require nonprofit hospitals (NPHs) to develop strategies to address prioritized health issues. We collected data on each proposed intervention from 125 randomly selected NPHs over three reporting periods. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess how well a single-factor model approximated community orientation. We conclude that using hospital community orientation measurement is a useful metric to assess the effects of expanded CB regulations, as well as to determine how NPHs have interacted with communities over time.