Publicness in Private Health Care Organizations: Developing a Model for Analysis and Measuring a Current Status

Abstract

As of 2012, the Revised Public Health Care Law redefined public health care as function of organization from public ownership perspective. This aimed to increase private organization’s public activities to meet the expectation of policy goal to raise the overall publicness in Korean health care. However, there is no analytical framework on definition and measurement of organizational publicness even though there has been a large body of discussions around the publicness as a social value or service outcomes. We reviewed definition and measurement of the publicness of healthcare organizations and developed an analytical framework for evaluating the publicness in private organizations. Based on the framework we developed, we collected the survey data from twenty-eight private healthcare organizations and described the current status and perception on the publicness. According to the survey, the private organizations tend to perceive the publicness as follows: the competing value with profitability, or government’s control. Second, the private organizations performed the public activities mainly to make profit to run hospital and to promote social gain. Third, in the perspective of organization’s accountability and health services provision, it shows low publicness and limited democracy and transparency in organizational management process. These results show that the public activities of private healthcare organizations in Korea are mainly performed as an instrumental role to meet social demands.