Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #119620

Sabrina M. Charles, BA, Yale Law School & Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government, Yale University & Harvard University, 109 Church, Apartment 521, New Haven, CT 06510, 786-853-0019, sabrina.charles@yale.edu

Local health care clinics play a vital role in providing safety net services in the United States. Further, health clinics often provide health-related benefits to the community at large, such as health education and prevention services. Broadly termed “community benefits,” these benefits are key to advancing the public's health, particularly in chronically underserved areas.

Health clinics take various organizational forms (e.g., nonprofit, public, semi-public, for-profit, or hybrids of these organizational structures), and health care clinics of all forms at least partially rely on government funding for their financing schemes. This project evaluates and categorizes key community benefits that have been widely discussed in public health literature as either “contractible” or “difficult-to-contract” by determining whether they are definable, observable, verifiable, or varying combinations of the three. Next, this project identifies and discusses the efficacy of three key strategies that governments can employ to promote the provision of difficult to define, observe, and/or verify community benefits when contracting with private health care clinics: (1) contracting for proxies for difficult-to-contract community benefits; (2) contracting with organizations whose values and interests are convergent with the contracting government agency's; or (3) utilizing contractual incentives to “artificially” align contractor organizations' interests with those of the contracting government agency's.

This project concludes that a combination of strategies 1 and 2, or 1 and 3, will allow governments to effectively contract with private health clinics for the provision of difficult-to-contract community benefits.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of the session, the participant will be able to
• Identify which community benefit ideals are "contractible" or "difficult-to-contract"
• Identify strategies that contracting government agencies can employ to promote the provision of difficult-to-contract community benefits

Keywords: Law, Community-Based Health Promotion

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation