Major Stakeholders in the Healthcare Industry
Consumers
The main group of consumers is patients who need healthcare services from a physician, a hospital, or an outpatient facility. From an organizational perspective, the consumer is the most important stakeholder for an organization. The healthcare industry operates like a business. If a consumer has the means to pay out of pocket, from governmental sources, or from health insurance, the services will be provided. If an individual does not have the means to pay from any of these sources of funding, a service may not be provided. There is a principle of the U.S. healthcare system, duty to treat , which means that any person deserves basic care (Pointer et al., 2007). In some instances, healthcare providers will give care to someone who has no funding source and designate the care provided as a charitable care or bad debt , which means either the provider does not expect payment after the person’s inability to pay has been determined or the efforts to secure the payment have failed (Smith, 2008). Businesses also take the same action. Many of them provide a community service or donate funds to a charitable cause, yet both traditional businesses and healthcare organizations need to charge for their services in order to continue their operations.