Grant Will Reveal What Aurora Charity Hospitals Can Provide Beyond Health Care – By Quincy Snowdon, Staff Writer for the Aurora Sentinel
AURORA | Nearly a decade has passed since the derelict facility formerly know as the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center transformed into the booming Anschutz Medical Campus, however calculating the effect that Aurora’s Oz has had on the community can be slippery.
Despite having a reported $2.6 billion impact on the state economy from 2012-13 and providing nearly 22,000 jobs, the question of just what that means for the residents of north Aurora often lingers. Due to Anschutz’s tax exempt status, it can be a slick problem, but one researcher Gregory Tung is aiming to answer with a new grant.
“Now, because of the Affordable Care Act, there are all sorts of changes moving forward. Hospitals are going to be required to do a whole new range of activities and not just provide charity care, but think about other ways of interfacing with the community,” Tung said. “But what that actually looks like? Nobody really knows yet.”
Tung, an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Public Health at CU Anschutz, is spearheading a new initiative targeted at providing an answer to that question. Through a recently awarded $250,000 grant provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trust, Tung will be spending the next two years analyzing how a nonprofit hospital like Children’s Hospital Colorado can better benefit the community it serves. Mainly, that means finding ways to provide resources for Aurora residents apart from just occasionally providing free health care services.
“There’s tons of money, like $50 billion a year that’s spent on nonprofit community hospital benefit activities, and in the past almost all of that has been directed towards charity care, or basically providing free care,” he said.
The $250,000 grant will also see a matching $100,000 contribution from several other entities at CU Anschutz.
