Grateful Patient Philanthropy: A Challenge to Organizational Ethics

An examination of organization development in health care reveals a pattern of increasing reliance of academic medical centers toward new sources of revenue in support of operations. This trend is partly in response to the reduction of traditional funding sources such as public appropriations and tuition. Clinical income from faculty earnings and hospital transfer payments have supplanted heritage funding sources and are now predominantly institutional transactions rather than physician-patient interactions. Grateful patient philanthropy can be viewed as moving toward transactional status, with challenging ethical questions for the involved physician and patient as institutional control increases.