Primary Submission Category: Health systems
A Scoping Review of Anchor Hospitals in the United States
Authors: Cory Cronin, Kelly Choyke, Cheyenne Fenstemaker, Hannah Magold, Nita Reddy, Anne Mathew, Kendra Minichello, Berkeley Franz, Brian Gran,
Presenting Author: Natalie Narcelles*
Hospitals are increasingly being studied for their role as anchor institutions, defined by Koh (2020) as place-based organizations that invest in their communities as a way of doing business. This review aims to categorize and present how the anchor activities of hospitals are understood in contemporary literature, regardless of the use of anchor terminology, to better understand how hospitals impact their communities.
We conducted a literature search across four academic databases (i.e., PubMed, SCOPUS, CINAHL, SocINDEX) guided by PRISMA-ScR criteria. The research question deployed was: What is the scope of the literature available on hospitals’ anchoring efforts as it pertains to outreach and engagement and population health efforts? As such, the principle concept of this scoping review (Peters et al. 2020) is the breadth of the research on hospitals as anchor institutions.
We included 169 English language articles published after 1980. We classified the included studies into 4 sample types (Anchor Literature with Anchor Terminology, Anchor Literature with no Anchor Terminology, Literature Examples of Hospitals as Anchor Institutions, and Anchor Policy/Strategy) and 2 article types (Peer-Reviewed (n=64, 38%), Non-Peer Reviewed (n=105, 62%)). It was most common that articles fell under the “examples” type. Further assessed was the prevalence of 7 thematic categories within each type: Financial Impact (n=103 61%), Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) (n=114 67%), Community Engagement (n=85 50%), Partnership (n=75 44%), Strategy (n=27 16%), Direct Patient Care (n=82 49%), and Advocacy (n=8 5%).
Findings indicate that anchor concepts are prevalent in literature surrounding hospitals; however, this typically occurs through the characterization of the roles hospitals play rather than through the explicit use of anchor terminology. Additionally, these discussions are more frequently found in industry journals rather than in peer-reviewed articles within academic journals.