Community Health Needs Assessment Report & Implementation Plan: Fill & Download for Free

I would be surprised to find a not-for-profit hospital that didn't fulfill the letter of this Federal law, if not the spirit. If you want to check out a particular hospital, try this:Go to www.guidestar.org and register. It's free.Search for the hospital. If it's part of a system, there may only be one listing, for the system as a whole.Click on the name of the hospital, and then click on the tab with the Form 990. This is the report every 501(c)(3) files with the IRS.Open the latest one; it's a PDF file.Go to Schedule H. This is where they should document adherence to the requirements you're interested in.Many hospitals also publish the required Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) on their websites. Here's one, as just a random example: http://www.yakimamemorial.org/pdf/about/community-hna-2013.pdf

Sometimes your local health jurisdiction (county or State) might have some of these statistics. Monahrq measures healthcare outcomes. https://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/systems/monahrq/index.htmlHospitals are also required to post HAI data (healthcare-associated infections). https://www.cdc.gov/hai/index.htmlNon-profit hospitals are also required to submit community health needs assessment reports that are available to the public that could provide some additional information.Also, depending on the state where you live, there may be an All-Payer Claims Database (APCD), a Health Information Exchange (HIE), or a Clinical Data Repository (CDR) that may compile statistics of this nature.

Hospitals organized as nonprofit corporations in the U.S. are hospitals that operate as tax exempt entities under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. They don't pay sales, property, or income taxes, and donations to them are tax-deductible for the donor. They can borrow money in the form of tax-exempt bonds, meaning that the holders of the bonds don't pay taxes on the interest. This generally means that the hospital pays a lower interest rate than it would if the debt was taxable.If nonprofit hospitals make money from their operations, that money doesn't go to any individual owner, but is retained for facility improvements or to be used for the charitable purpose (health care) of the organization.All 501(c)(3) organizations file an annual report with the IRS, a Form 990, and a specific section has recently been added for hospitals. Some states have additional requirements for hospitals to maintain their not-for-profit status.The Affordable Care Act added some requirements.Each 501(c)(3) hospital organization is required to meet four general requirements on a facility-by-facility basis:establish written financial assistance and emergency medical care policies,limit amounts charged for emergency or other medically necessary care to individuals eligible for assistance under the hospital's financial assistance policy,make reasonable efforts to determine whether an individual is eligible for assistance under the hospital’s financial assistance policy before engaging in extraordinary collection actions against the individual, andconduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) and adopt an implementation strategy at least once every three years.They don't make a huge amount of money; the average margin for not-for-profit hospitals is between two and three percent. (http://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2014/04/25/moodys-not-for-profit-hospital-margins-fall)Anyone who is interested in knowing what a nonprofit hospital's finances look like can access the Form 990 for free at www.guidestar.org. Audited financials for many hospitals can be seen, also for free, at www.emma.msrb.org.