Medical facilities, like hospitals, have a unique group of shareholders who play separate roles in the decision making process, or who are differently invested in organizational outcomes. Generally, stakeholders include board members and executive leadership, consumers, and their advocates, clinicians and practitioners, other medical institutions, policymakers, research institutions, and payers, or insurers.
One of the most challenging areas of corporate responsibility, for medical providers, is finding a way to balance the need of corporate stakeholders, with the best medical interest of practitioners and patients (AHRQ, 2014). Stakeholders, as individuals or interest groups, have equal stakes in the organizational success, but the ways in which they are impacted or affected by the organizations success are very different.
In this case, internal stakeholders are those that are within the organization, or specific to the hospital, including patients and their advocates, medical practitioners, investors, board members and executive leadership. External stakeholders include other medical institutions, policymakers, research institutions, and payers or insurers 1(AHRQ, 2014). For a hospital to meet or exceed the expectations for these stakeholders, it must have prioritized performance goals that both protect the safety and privacy of consumers, while maximizing profitability for investors. These performance goals help to measure attainment of given goals, and to ensure that there is improving return on investment within the medical setting, as it relates to both profitability and quality of care. For example, in order to meet the demands of patients, it is essential that the hospital provide higher quality medical care, with faster diagnosis and treatment to return patients to health, while keeping services at an affordable price. In contrast, in order to meet the demands of investors, or financial stakeholders, the hospital must more effectively operate more financially efficiently. This means increasing profitability through increased charges, decreasing total service time, and other similar means.
References:
AHRQ (2014). Stakeholder Guide 2014. Effective Healthcare. Retrieved from http://www.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/research/findings/evidence-based-reports/stakeholderguide/stakeholdr.pdf
