Health planning: appropriateness review.

Abstract

During the last half of 1980, health systems agencies (HSAs) throughout the country will be conducting appropriateness reviews for the first time. For many HSAs, this will be their initial venture into reviewing existing institutional health services, as distinguished from their reviews of proposed capital expenditures and new institutional health services under the authority of Section 1122 of the Social Security Act or state certificate of need (CON) laws. The scope, content, and effect of appropriateness reviews present numerous areas of uncertainty, some of which this article will examine.Appropriateness review was enacted originally as part of the National Health Planning and Resources Development Act of 1974 (the “Act”). It was a compromise. The concept originated among health planners who were dissatisfied with their inability to initiate changes in the health care delivery system. This weakness resulted from their essentially reactive posture in reviewing new projects proposed by existing facilities.