Report names top drivers of healthcare fundraising

Escalating globalization, the growing economic importance of small businesses, and the need to develop innovative sources of funding will be the top drivers for supporting the future of healthcare fundraising, says a new study. The emerging trends study was released Monday by the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP), a not-for-profit organization whose more than 4,700 members direct philanthropic programs in 2,000 of North America's not-for-profit health care providers.
Full text article by Molly Merrill is available via Healthcare Finance News, 3/2/10.

Heroes of Children's Hospital

Dateline NBC" presented an hour-long program filmed entirely at Arkansas Children's Hospital on January 31. The program was a year and a half in the making, and featured several UAMS residents as they learn pediatrics at ACH. During the filming of the program, which is hosted by Dr. Nancy Snyderman, numerous ACH personnel were taped and interviewed.
Full text article by Dr. Nancy Snyderman is available via Dateline NBC, 1/31/10.

Sebelius, Solis Announce Nearly $1 Billion Recovery Act Investment in Advancing Use of Health IT, Training Workers for Health Jobs of the Future

More than $225-million in U.S. Department of Labor grant awards are being earmarked to train 15,000 people for careers in health care, information technology, and other fast-growing fields. The training will be offered at community colleges and other local education providers. The money is part of $1-billion in federal stimulus money being doled out to help make health information technology available to more than 100,000 health-care providers by 2014 and to support job training.

Full text article is available via the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2/12/10.

Expecting a Surge in U.S. Medical Schools

The Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pennsylvania is one of nearly two dozen medical schools that have recently opened or might open across the country, the most at any time since the 1960s and ’70s. These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter century. Many bright students were fleeing to offshore medical schools, or giving up hope entirely, when they could not get into domestic schools.
Full text article by Anemona Hartocollis is available via The New York Times, 2/14/10.

Charity hospitals get one-year reprieve in state budget proposal

Louisiana's charity-hospital system will get a one-year reprieve from sweeping budget changes designed to shift mental-health money from state institutions to private and neighborhood care options. The charity system, run by Louisiana State University, was facing the prospect of closing several small hospitals due to budget pressure. But the state's Health and Hospitals Secretary, Alan Levine, said Gov. Bobby Jindal's proposed 2010-11 spending plan provides enough money to get the system through the year while a long-term plan for its future is developed.

Full text article by Jan Moller is available via The Times-Picayune, 2/10/10.

St. Vincent’s Gets Loans for a Four-Week Reprieve

A combination of state loans and assistance from creditors will help New York's St. Vincent's Hospital stay afloat for another four weeks while officials seek a long-term solution to the facility's financial woes. St. Vincent's, the city's last Catholic general hospital, is $700-million in debt and seeking a partner to avoid a second bankruptcy in five years. Continuum Health Partners, one of New York's largest hospital systems, has offered to step in but wants to make St. Vincent's an outpatient center.

Full text article by Anemona Hartocollis is available via The New York Times, 2/3/10.

SE hospital believes nonprofit status could help finances

Washington's United Medical Center is seeking charitable status to stave off a worsening financial crisis and continue serving the city's poorest neighborhoods. Frank G. DeLisi, the hospital's chief executive, said the conversion would save the center hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax bills, lift fund raising, and qualify it for higher Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.

Full text article by Tim Craig is available via The Washington Post, 1/24/10.

Mayo Clinic's philanthropy campaign raises $1.35 billion

Minnesota's Mayo Clinic on Tuesday reported collecting $1.35-billion in its first sustained philanthropy campaign for operating costs. The famed medical center started the campaign in 2005 with a goal of raising $1.25-billion in seven years. While Mayo had previously sought donations from benefactors and former patients for new buildings, the current campaign was its first aimed at raising money for care, research, and education programs.

Full text article by Chen May Yee is available via Star Tribune, 1/26/10.

Burnham Institute Gets A Big Gift And A New Name

The Burnham Institute for Medical Research has been renamed the Sanford-Burnham institute. This follows a $50 million gift from South Dakota banker Denny Sanford.

Full text article by Tom Fudge is available via KPBS, 1/26/10.

Bill and Melinda Gates Pledge $10-Billion for Vaccine Efforts

Calling for a new “decade of vaccines,” Bill and Melinda Gates announced that their foundation will spend $10-billion over the next 10 years for the development and delivery of vaccines to impoverished people—the largest pledge ever by a grant maker to a specific cause.

Full text article by Ian Wilhelm is available via The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 1/29/10.

Mexico-US collaboration launched

The Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu has committed $65-million to a new research project to identify the genomic basis of major diseases. The three-year Slim Initiative for Genomic Medicine aims to speed the development of therapies to prevent and treat cancer worldwide and type 2 diabetes among Mexicans and Latin Americans. The work will be conducted by the Carlos Slim Institute of Public Health in collaboration with Mexican health officials and the Broad Institute, which was founded in 2003 by Harvard, MIT, and the philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad to pursue medical advancements through DNA sequencing.

Full text article by Nicole Davis is available via the Broad Institute, 1/19/10.

Healthcare Donors Switching to Long-Term Giving Strategies

Businesses and individuals hit hard by the economic downturn shifted their charitable giving strategies to longer-term pledges and gift commitments rather than forgo giving altogether, a new report from the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy finds. Mouli Cohen, philanthropist and technology entrepreneur, was asked for his opinion on this week’s developments.

Full text article by Mouli Cohen is available via PRWeb, 1/13/10.

Using a Pfizer Grant, Courses Aim to Avoid Bias

Stanford University is expected to unveil plans today to develop new, bias-free programs of continuing medical education for doctors. The work is being made possible by a $3-million grant from the drug maker Pfizer. The university announced in 2008 that it would severely restrict industry support for medical education in order to avoid conflicts of interest. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a Georgetown University medical professor, called the announcement "self-satirizing." But Stanford's medical dean, Philip Pizzo, said he understood the skepticism about whether an industry-backed approach could be free of bias, but asserted that Pfizer would have no say in how the grant was used.

Full text article by Duff Wilson is available via The New York Times, 1/11/10.

Pioneering L.A. nonprofit is saving lives in Afghanistan

The International Medical Corps’ longstanding relief work in Afghanistan and other war zones is the subject of an article in the Los Angeles Times. The Los Angeles organization, founded in 1984 to shore up an Afghan health-care system devastated by the Soviet invasion, has forged deep ties in Afghan communities, winning protection from village councils and facing relatively little threat from the Taliban. It has sought to help Afghans build their own abilities to provide health services by hiring native-born doctors, midwives, pharmacists, and other medical experts to operate its clinics.

Full text article by Alexandra Zavis is available via the Los Angeles Times, 1/5/10.

Recession Leaves Its Mark on Hospital Fund Raising

In a sign of how the recession is changing giving patterns. hospitals say more donors are making long-term pledges and fewer are making outright cash gifts, according to a new survey of 58 hospitals conducted by the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy.

Full text article by Holly Hall is available via The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 12/28/09.

John Muir Health Employees Contribute $1.8 Million for Hospital Renovations

John Muir Health Foundation, the charitable fundraising organization for all John Muir Health programs and services, announced today that employees of John Muir Health have contributed more than $1.8 million to the Capital Campaign supporting hospital renovation and expansion projects in Walnut Creek and Concord.

Full text article is available via Earth Times, 12/1/09.

Charitable Giving for U.S. Health Care Rises a Tepid $241 Million in 2008, While Canadian Charitable Giving Plunges 13 Percent, Association for Health

Charitable donations to benefit U.S. health care grew by $241-million, to $8.6-billion, in 2008, a 2.9 percent growth. In Canada health-care giving plummeted by nearly 13 percent, to just under $1.1-billion. The slight bump in U.S. medical giving resulted from most nonprofit hospitals and health-care systems closing their books before the recession hit with full force in the final quarter of 2008, the association reported. Institutions that closed at end of the calendar year reported a 0.2 percent fund-raising dip.

Full-text post by Kathy Renzetti is available via the New York Post, 10/26/09.

Nonprofit Groups Upset at Exclusion From Health Bills

The health care bill proposed by the Congress and the current administration, awarding a tax credit to small businesses that provide their employees with health insurance, is upsetting nonprofits who do not pay income taxes and thus would not benefit. President Obama’s statement in his health-care speech last week that a health-care system overhaul would benefit “families, businesses, and government” is fueling the fire from nonprofit groups, which say they are being left out of efforts to give employers relief from rising health-care costs.

Full-text post by Stephanie Strom is available via The New York Times, 9/13/09.

A Nonprofit Push for Change

As the public debate over health care grows increasingly combative, a host of nonprofit groups is working to ensure that an overhaul of the system is successful.

Full-text article by Suzanne Perry is available via The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 8.20.09.

Lawmakers Asked to Weigh Overhaul's Impact on Charities

Charity leaders are pressing lawmakers to consider how various provisions of the health-care legislation now before Congress will affect nonprofit organizations.

Full-text article by Ian Wilhelm is available via The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 8.20.09.

Voices of recovery – In their own words.

" . . . we are certainly seeing a real boom in health care in our area. . . Well, we in the health care industry aren't recession-proof but we're recession resistant.”

Full text post is available via Idaho Business Review, 8.3.09

Alternative futures for health care philanthropy - Are you ready?

As we cope with the current economic crisis, it is important not to lose sight of what lays upon the horizon. The Association for Healthcare Philanthropy and its membership face the task of navigating the confluence of two sectors undergoing profound change within the coming years: health care and philanthropy. AHP has embarked on a project to determine the future of these two sectors using scenario analysis which is leading to interesting possible conclusions and action-items.

Full-text article by William C. McGinley is availabe via the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy, 12.9.08.

The Noblis Center for Health Innovation Forecasts 2009 Trends In Provider Health Care Delivery

With access to capital becoming more restricted accompanied by a significant decline in philanthropic giving, dwindling investment income, increasing bad debt and growing charity care, many hospitals and health systems are extremely vulnerable.

Full-text press release is available via MarketWatch.com, 12.3.08.