WHAT IS A COMMUNITY HOSPITAL?

The Modern Definition of a Community Hospital

Depending on whom you ask, a community hospital could be defined in a number of different ways.
That problem came in an editorial team meeting in the Becker’s office earlier this year, as we were planning for the July issue of our magazine — the “Community Hospitals Issue.” As we sat discussing article topics, one of my colleagues spoke up and asked a deceivingly difficult question: What makes a hospital a community hospital?
The team struggled to provide solid definition for her. And that got us thinking.
In the search of a definition, we turned first to the American Hospital Association, which has one of the most generous definitions for community hospitals: all nonfederal, short-term general, and other special hospitals. “Community hospitals include academic medical centers or other teaching hospitals if they are nonfederal short-term hospitals,” according to AHA. The
AHA used to have an even broader definition of what a community hospital is — before 1972, the definition even included prison and college infirmaries.
Other organizations define the term differently and more narrowly. Truven Health Analytics, for example, divides hospitals into five comparison groups when forming its 100 Top Hospitals list: major teaching hospitals, teaching hospitals, large community hospitals, medium community hospitals and small community hospitals. A hospital is put into one of the community hospital groupings if it is not classified as a teaching hospital — meaning it does not have an intern- and resident-per-bed ratio of at least 0.03 or involvement in at least three GME programs overall.
Similarly, for the 100 Great Community Hospitals list we put together here at Becker’s Hospital Review, we define community hospitals as those that have fewer than 550 beds and minimal teaching programs.
While those definitions serve a purpose — organizations need to classify hospitals in some way — the broader definition of what a community hospital is goes beyond bed size and teaching status and into various factors, including location, governance structure, the role it plays in a town’s economy and the role it plays in increasing care access, among others.
Typically, a community hospital is located in a smaller town, away from a large metropolitan area. However, small cities are not the only place a community hospital can be found, according to Joe Lupica, chairman of Newpoint Healthcare Advisors.

“A big city can have community hospitals in it, but they have to serve a market segment distinct from a major tertiary care center,” he says. The AHA concurs, as it breaks down its definition of community hospital into two groups: rural community hospitals, with a count of 1,971, and urban community hospitals, which clock in at 3,003.
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