The Network for Public Health Law provides insightful legal assistance, helpful resources and opportunities to build connections for local, tribal, state and federal officials; public health practitioners; attorneys; policy-makers; and advocates.
The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, is a national initiative designed to promote the use of health impact assessments as a decision-making tool for policymakers.
A new study funded by a grant from Public Health Law Research shows that New Jersey’s law requiring novice drivers to display their probationary status with a red decal on their license plates has prevented over 1,600 crashes and has helped police officers to enforce regulations unique to young drivers.
A new study shows that the 2009 federal tobacco tax helped cut youth smoking.
Updated standards for snacks, drinks sold in school likely to have positive impact, study finds.
Millions of injuries could be prevented each year if more states adopted additional research-based injury prevention policies, and if programs were fully implemented and enforced.
Nonprofit hospitals are required to provide benefits to the communities they serve to keep a tax-exempt status. Nationwide, about 2,900 hospitals (60% of hospitals) are nonprofit and the financial benefit to these hospitals from being tax-exempt is estimated to be worth $12.6 billion annually.
Historically, much of hospitals’ community benefit activities have been charity care and other forms of uncompensated care. A lack of transparency and wide variations in how, and how much, hospitals spend for community benefits led to increased oversight by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Congress. New community benefit requirements under the Affordable Care Act include community health needs assessments and improvement plans, as well as additional consumer protections on financial assistance, billing, and collections practices.
To help public health officials and policy-makers better understand the opportunity around the community benefit requirements for nonprofit hospitals, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded The Hilltop Institute at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)—a research center that focuses on the needs of vulnerable populations—to publish a series of issue briefs on best practices, new laws and regulations, and study findings related to community benefit activities and reporting.
Learn moreThe program provides tools to state and local health departments, hospital regulators, legislators, revenue collection and budgeting agencies, and hospitals, as these stakeholders develop approaches that will best suit their communities and work toward a more accessible, coordinated, and effective community health system.
Learn moreNewPublicHealth caught up with Martha Somerville, JD, MPH, Hilltop’s Hospital Community Benefit Program Director, and Kevin Barnett, DrPH, MCP, Senior Investigator at the Public Health Institute, to discuss two new briefs on reporting requirements and community building, and what they add to the evolving field of hospital community benefit efforts to improve the health of communities.
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