Nonprofit Partners Research Articles

Editor's Note

HomeCirculationVol. 111, No. 10Editor's Note Free AccessEditorialPDF/EPUBAboutView PDFView EPUBSections ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload citationsTrack citationsPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InMendeleyReddit Jump toFree AccessEditorialPDF/EPUBEditor's Note Emelia J. Benjamin, MD, ScM Emelia J. BenjaminEmelia J. Benjamin Guest Editor, Circulation Search for more papers by this author Originally published15 Mar 2005https://doi.org/10.1161/01.CIR.0000160457.74448.69Circulation. 2005;111:1204Researchers and clinicians have made astonishing strides in cardiovascular disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. The tremendous progress throws into stark contrast the disturbing persistence of disparities in cardiovascular disease risk factors, treatment, and outcome by ethnicity, race, socioeconomic conditions, and region. The causes of ethnic and racial disparities in cardiovascular disease are highly complex and incompletely understood. The American Heart Association and the Editorial Board of Circulation seek to encourage research and practice to reveal the causes, consequences, and effective initiatives to diminish ethnic and racial disparities in health care.The present issue of Circulation includes the Executive Summary of the American Heart Association’s National Conference “Discovering the Full Spectrum of Cardiovascular Disease: The Minority Health Summit 2003.” In addition, the issue features editorials and commentaries by thought leaders on approaches to eradicating ethnic and racial disparities in cardiovascular disease. The Editorial Board of Circulation solicited and is featuring original research that addresses ethnic and racial disparities. The original research provides valuable insights into ethnic and racial disparities in a wide range of cardiovascular disease fields, including: Epidemiology and health outcomes; subclinical disease (coronary artery calcification); clinical (coronary heart disease, valvular heart disease, heart failure, hypertension, and stroke) and interventional cardiology; surgery; pediatric cardiology; and international health. In addition, the issue includes a report by Becker and colleagues on a novel, effective, community-based intervention to prevent cardiovascular disease in high-risk American black families. The breadth and quality of submissions engenders cautious optimism that clinical, research, nonprofit, and government partners can effectively diminish ethnic and racial disparities in cardiovascular disease.During the production of this themed issue, the question of terminology used to define racial/ethnic groups created considerable discussion among those associated with the Journal and this special content. For a discussion of the complexities of the issue, we refer you to the publication by Kaplan and Bennett (Kaplan JOB, Bennett T. Use of race and ethnicity in biomedical publication. JAMA. 2003;289:2709–2716). We sought to use terminology that was accurate in describing the populations studied and discussed while remaining sensitive to the historical and current use of language and its ability to create stereotypes and stigma. This effort was overlaid on the existing Journal style for Circulation. As an international journal, Circulation uses, with exceptions, the terms “blacks” and “whites” in describing differing racial/ethnic groups. We hope that the use of this imperfect compromise does not detract from the science and will be viewed by the readership as an accurate and unbiased attempt to describe the disparities in cardiovascular healthcare. Previous Back to top Next FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails March 15, 2005Vol 111, Issue 10 Advertisement Article InformationMetrics https://doi.org/10.1161/01.CIR.0000160457.74448.69 Originally publishedMarch 15, 2005 PDF download Advertisement SubjectsEthics and Policy

AMA Urged To Make Electronic Records Policy Priority

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessAMA Urged To Make Electronic Records Policy PriorityMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:21 Jan 2005https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.40.2.00400001b The electronic health record is coming to American medicine. That's what National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David Brailer, M.D., Ph.D., told physicians at the interim meeting of the American Medical Association House of Delegates last month in Atlanta.David Brailer, M.D., Ph.D., coordinates the nation's health information technology efforts. His position was created by President Bush last year.Brailer urged delegates to make adoption of the electronic health information record the number-one member services and policy priority for the AMA.“The electronic health record is the undisputed next step,” Brailer said. “When used properly in patient care, it can be therapeutic. This observation is well founded in the scientific evidence that shows that drug-drug interaction checking, allergy checking, public health surveillance, preventive care reminders, and evidence-based decision support can systematically and reproducibly improve health status, longevity, and overall care.”Brailer cited a 2003 study from the Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL) showing that nationwide adoption of ambulatory computerized physician order entry alone could prevent more than 2 million adverse drug events and nearly 190,000 unnecessary hospitalizations each year.(CITL was chartered in 2002 by Boston-based, nonprofit Partners HealthCare System as a research organization to help guide the health care community in making more-informed technology investment decisions.)“This would save $44 billion in reduced medication, utilization, and other costs,” Brailer said. “These data demonstrate to me that the electronic health record is part of the therapeutic regimen and is indispensable to care delivery.”Brailer, who was named the most powerful person in health care today in a survey of health care leaders by the magazine Modern Healthcare, offered a vision of American medicine's future that will be shaped less by government policies and politics than by technological innovations that have transformed other aspects of the American economy.“The answer for health care is the same as it is for every other industry,” Brailer said. “Information, automation, and standardization can support the central role of the consumer and the professional.”As he noted in his address to AMA delegates, his office has oversight of more than $5 billion in health information spending by the federal government.“Our charge from the president is to restructure and align that spending to get the most value for the American people every year,” Brailer said. “We intend to change the marketplace so that [electronic health information products] are cheaper, less risky, interoperable, easier to use, and beneficial.”He was appointed to the new federal position by President George W. Bush last year and charged with achieving widespread deployment of electronic health information technology within 10 years.Brailer acknowledged the distance medicine still has to travel to achieve the promise of electronic technology. While the adoption of electronic health records by large health systems and large physician groups has been encouraging, and is becoming more commonplace, adoption by small physician groups and offices is much more problematic, he said.“I am worried about small physician offices that struggle to know which records to buy and to implement in order to get value for themselves and their patients,” Brailer said. “Without proper support, the electronic health record is just software in a computer, because the critically important improvements in process of care, decision making, and outcomes will not be realized.”And pioneers in the field of electronic health records are beset by the“ first mover disadvantage” typically confronting those who are the first to implement a new technology: they bear the costs, while those who adopt the technology later reap the benefits of those who have preceded them.Brailer outlined for AMA delegates several things his office is pursuing in order to level the playing field for small and large physician practices and speed the adoption of e-health records.Among these is the formation of a 14-member accreditation commission to help accredit and standardize electronic health record products. It will be the job of the commission to “inspect electronic health record products for functionality, interoperativity, and security,” Brailer said.The government has also encouraged the formation of Regional Health Information Organizations. “These will help organize physicians, purchasers, and hospitals to set their own fate, be free of regulation, and work toward adoption of electronic health records for their own local area,” Brailer said.He added that the government is working to encourage the development of a national health information network—what some have called “the medical Internet.”“The national health information network will allow secure, timely, useful exchange of health information between clinicians.” ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Commsmakers: LINX

In the early 1990s, the way information flowed in the Internet was fairly simple. In fact, most traffic went through the US. This meant that Internet service providers (ISPs) from elsewhere had to pay a premium for transferring data backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. A number of ISPs began to see the financial benefits of keeping their traffic local and set up one-to-one peering links with each other. But it was not until countries outside the US began to set up their own Internet exchanges that the situation really started to change. In the UK this happened in 1994, when five ISPs got together and formed the London Internet Exchange (LINX). Now, instead of having to establish individual peering agreements and manually set up links, this is all done automatically in the exchange. Ten years on, this non-profit partnership, now extended to 163 members, has become firmly established. In fact, the UK government now recognises LINX as critical to the nation's infrastructure in the same way that major railway stations and airports are. The article describes how LINX grew to became the busiest Internet exchange in the world.

EXPLORING UNEASY LEARNING ALLIANCES BETWEEN CORPORATIONS AND NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS.

This article investigates how corporate and non-profit organization alliance partners overcome fundamental differences in values, structure, and mission. The article states that the three main stages of alliance creation are rationale, formation and performance, and that the two types of cross-sector alliances are proactive and reactive.The article discusses the three largest collaboration issues: legitimacy, trust, and knowledge sharing. The article explains the within-stage differences in the identification of two types of cross-sector learning alliances, such as how, in the rationale stage, proactive firms saw an opportunity to leverage a supportive internal context and the external network resources from their customers.

Making Money While Making a Difference: How to Profit with a Nonprofit Partner

Making Money While Making a Difference: How to Profit with a Nonprofit Partner

Government–nonprofit partnership: a defining framework

AbstractPartnership has emerged as an increasingly popular approach to privatization and government–nonprofit relations generally. While in principle it offers many advantages, there is no consensus on what it means and its practice varies. Following a review of partnership literature, the article refines the partnership concept, developing two definitional dimensions: mutuality and organization identity. Based on these dimensions, partnership is defined on a relative scale and is distinguished from other relationship types: contracting, extension, and co‐optation or gradual absorption. Examples of each are provided. The model enables actors to assess their relative tolerance for partnership approaches, and provides a common language among potential partners. Linking its defining dimensions to partnership's value‐added assists partners to advocate for partnership approaches from an instrumental as well as normative perspective. The model and inter‐organizational relationship matrix can inform continuing theory building and practical experimentation both to refine defining dimensions and indicators of partnership practice, and to enhance responsiveness to partners' expectations of partnership. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Government–nonprofit partners for health sector reform in Central Asia: family group practice associations in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

AbstractFaced with limited resources, governments in developing and transitioning countries are struggling to find the resources to provide basic health services. Increasingly, governments are turning to the private and nonprofit sectors as partners. This article examines the experience of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in creating new nonprofit organizations as part of health sector reform. Family Group Practice Associations (FGPAs) serve as intermediaries between public sector health agencies and newly created family group practices (FGPs), which are providing improved levels of primary health care. The FGPAs have helped to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of health service delivery, and have contributed to making the top‐heavy and cumbersome health systems in both countries more flexible and responsive. Although their policy advocacy role is still relatively incipient, FGPAs provide a potential avenue for increasing external input into policy decisions. The weight of the past has made progress relatively slow, with large power differentials between the nonprofits and their government partners, a constrained legal framework for non‐governmental entities, and weak capacity among the newly created FGPAs and FGPs. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Where Nonprofit Management Education Meets the Undergraduate Experience

The growth of nonprofit management education programs is of interest to practitioners in the public sector because of the inextricable links between the government, business, and nonprofit sectors. The education of nonprofit professionals, therefore, is of interest to those concerned about the efficiency and effectiveness of nonprofit organizations to provide essential human services. This article examines one undergraduate model of nonprofit management education promulgated by American Humanics (AH), a national organization with a network of campus affiliates that offers a unique curricular and cocurricular field of study. Despite a history of more than 50 years, AH has been largely unknown until the 1990s, when attention to nonprofit management education increased. Thanks to significant foundation funding, especially from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, AH began an aggressive campus expansion plan to more than 80 campus affiliates. This article analyzes the numerous contributions of AH to the evolution of nonprofit management education. These contributions include several unique features, such as a competency-based approach to education, a student development framework, a unique cocurricular program design, and a campus-based delivery system. Furthermore, AH, with its multidisciplinary approach to the field, is unique in fostering practitioner-academic partnerships through its coalition of National Nonprofit Partners, Collaborating Professional Organizations, and affiliated academic institutions.

Nonprofit and for-Profit Partnerships: Rationale and Challenges of Cross-Sector Contracting

Nonprofit and for-Profit Partnerships: Rationale and Challenges of Cross-Sector Contracting

New roles of nonprofit organizations and partnership with government and/or business

The term NGO has been used more specifically to encompass nonprofit organizations engaged in international programs. In recent years, what Professor Lester Salamon of the Institute of Policy Studies of Johns Hopkins University has referred to as the ‘nonprofit sector’ seems popular worldwide. He defines nonprofit organizations as ‘organizations that share seven common features: they are formally constituted; organizationally separate from government; non‐profit‐seeking; self‐governing; voluntary to some significant degree; nonreligious; and nonpolitical (Salamon and Anheier 1994).’ To avoid confusion, the term ‘NGO’ is used in this paper in reference to nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations that are independent from any particular government office or private corporation and which are pursuing public interests.

Organizational Forms and Architectural Space: Building Meaning in Charitable Organizations in New York City, 1770 to 1920

Over the past 15 years, organizational theory and nonprofit scholarship have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance, yet both perspectives still lack a clear understanding of organizational forms. This article suggests ways of tracing the development and differentiation of organizational forms through empirical analyses of the built environment and argues that this approach offers valuable insight into the history of nonprofit charitable organizations, public-private partnerships, and citizen participation in a developing democracy. The mainfocus is on how charitable practices operated within buildings and how different buildings used by charitable organizations in the 19th century limited and defined social service provision. Investigating the ways in which early organizational struggles over space influenced, constrained, and/or enabled organizational institutionalization can lead to greater understandings of American civil society.

Squamous cell carcinoma of the scrotum in an aluminium worker

Through a randomized, controlled laboratory experiment and a natural field experiment with a nonprofit organization partner, we test the efficacy of economic valuation information as a communication strategy for encouraging environmental philanthropy. Although the use of monetary values in fundraising appeals might encourage some to give, for others it may crowd out intrinsic motivation to donate. We find that recent monetary support of environmental causes and organization membership status interact with the economic valuation treatment. Significant heterogeneous effects are found in both experiments, but evidence of motivation crowding is found only in the field.

Of Market Failure, Voluntary Failure, and Third-Party Government: Toward a Theory of Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State

Despite the fact that gouernment in the United States relies more heavily on nonprofit organizations than on its own instrumentalities to deliver government- funded human services, and that nonprofits receive more of their income from government than from any other single source, the phenomenon of government- nonprofit partnership has been largely overlooked both in analyses of the welfare state and in research on the voluntary sector. This article argues that this neglect of government-nonprofit ties is less the product of a lack of research than of important weaknesses in theory. Both the theory of the welfare state and the theory of the voluntary sector, moreover, are deficient. To overcome these weaknesses, the article advances an alternative theoretical formulation that replaces the prevailing con ception of the welfare state with the concept of "third-party government," and replaces the current "market failure-government failure" theory of the voluntary sector with a theory built around the concept of "voluntary failure" instead. Viewed through these alternative conceptual lenses, the phenomenon of government-non profit partnership comes into far better view and becomes far more understandable. Against the backdrop of this alternative theory, the article then identifies a number of principles that should guide government-nonprofit relations in the years ahead.