Decision points for hospital-based health promotion

Hospitals that are developing health promotion programs to market to business and the community need to develop a high quality product. Hospitals frequently gain needed experience in health promotion by providing the service to their own employees. Cases are presented that illustrate several crucial choices hospitals must make in developing health promotion programs. These choices include selection of markets; activities to be included; linkages to other health services; purchase of an existing program or development in-house; extent of employee involvement; and information to be collected for assessing outcomes.