Foundations of Hospital Administration

Introduction and Context

Hospitals are among the most complex organizations in society. They combine clinical knowledge, highly specialized technology, public expectations, professional autonomy, financial constraints, regulation, and ethical responsibility. Unlike ordinary businesses, hospitals must remain prepared for unpredictable demand while protecting life, dignity, privacy, and safety. Hospital administration provides the systems through which these responsibilities are coordinated.

Hospital administration is the professional management of a hospital’s people, services, resources, information, facilities, finances, and relationships in order to achieve safe, effective, accessible, ethical, and sustainable healthcare. It is broader than office management. It connects strategic planning with daily operations and links clinical work with governance, public policy, and community needs.

A hospital administrator does not replace the professional judgment of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, or allied health personnel. Rather, the administrator creates the conditions in which professionals can deliver appropriate care: adequate staffing, reliable supplies, safe facilities, accurate information, effective processes, financial stewardship, and compliance with law and standards.

Learning Objectives

After studying this chapter, the learner should be able to:

1. Define hospital administration and distinguish it from related terms.
2. Classify hospitals by ownership, service scope, level of care, teaching role, and duration of care.
3. Explain the major functions and organizational relationships of hospitals.
4. Describe the historical evolution of hospitals and modern healthcare systems.
5. Explain primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary levels of care.
6. Identify major hospital stakeholders and their responsibilities.
7. Discuss the responsibilities, competencies, and ethical obligations of hospital administrators.
8. Apply foundational administrative concepts to a practical hospital-management problem.

1. Meaning and Scope of Hospital Administration

Administration, management, and governance

The terms administration, management, and governance are related but not identical.

Administration concerns the overall direction, coordination, and control of an organization. It includes policy implementation, resource allocation, legal compliance, and institutional planning.

Management is the process of planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, and controlling resources to achieve defined objectives. It is often concerned with execution and performance.

Governance refers to the structures and processes through which an institution is directed, supervised, held accountable, and aligned with its mission. A hospital board or governing body usually provides governance, while the chief executive and management team administer the organization.

In practice, boundaries overlap. A hospital administrator may participate in policy development, operational management, quality improvement, budgeting, workforce planning, and risk management. The distinction is useful because it clarifies accountability: the governing body oversees the institution, whereas management is responsible for implementing approved strategy and achieving operational results.

Hospital administration as a system

A hospital can be understood as an open system. It receives inputs, transforms them through coordinated processes, and produces outputs and outcomes.

Inputs include patients, staff, medicines, equipment, information, buildings, utilities, technology, and funding. Processes include diagnosis, treatment, nursing care, rehabilitation, procurement, admission, discharge, cleaning, laboratory testing, and information management. Outputs include services delivered, patients discharged, procedures completed, and reports produced. Outcomes include improved health, patient safety, patient experience, equity, and community health.

The system is open because the hospital is affected by its environment: government policy, demographic change, disease patterns, technological development, labor markets, insurance systems, and community expectations. Feedback from patients, staff, audits, clinical outcomes, and regulators should be used to improve the system.

A useful quality framework is the structure–process–outcome model. Structure includes facilities, staffing, equipment, and organizational arrangements. Process includes what is done and how it is done, such as medication administration or infection prevention. Outcome includes mortality, complications, recovery, patient experience, and functional improvement. Good structure supports good processes, but neither guarantees good outcomes; monitoring and continuous improvement remain necessary.

2. Important Hospital Terminology

Terminology may vary by country and regulatory system. Administrators must therefore use locally recognized legal and professional definitions in official documents.

3. Classification of Hospitals

No single classification describes every hospital. A hospital may simultaneously be public, teaching, tertiary, specialized, and not-for-profit. Classification is therefore multidimensional.

By ownership and control

Public hospitals are owned or controlled by national, regional, or local government. They often have obligations to provide services to the population regardless of ability to pay and may serve as referral centers for public health programs.

Private not-for-profit hospitals are controlled by charitable, religious, educational, or community organizations. Surpluses are generally reinvested in services, facilities, or community programs.

Private for-profit hospitals are owned by individuals, companies, or investor groups. They must meet legal and professional obligations while maintaining financial sustainability.

Military, occupational, and institutional hospitals serve defined populations, such as armed forces personnel, industrial workers, or correctional populations.

By service scope

General hospitals provide a broad range of services, such as medicine, surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics, emergency care, diagnostics, and nursing.

Specialized hospitals focus on a particular disease, age group, organ system, or service. Examples include psychiatric, maternity, orthopedic, pediatric, cardiac, cancer, and rehabilitation hospitals.

Multi-specialty hospitals provide several specialized departments within one institution. Their complexity requires strong coordination, referral systems, and diagnostic support.

By level of care

Hospitals may be classified as primary, secondary, tertiary, or quaternary according to the complexity of services and referral responsibility. These levels are discussed in detail later in the chapter.

By teaching and research role

A teaching hospital provides structured education and supervised clinical experience for medical, nursing, pharmacy, public-health, and allied-health students. An academic medical center generally combines complex clinical care with substantial teaching and research. Teaching hospitals require additional systems for supervision, consent, research ethics, documentation, and competency assessment.

By duration of care

Acute-care hospitals provide short-term treatment for sudden illness, injury, surgery, or exacerbation of chronic disease. Long-term-care hospitals provide care for patients requiring prolonged medical or nursing support. Rehabilitation hospitals focus on restoring function after illness or injury. Hospice and palliative-care institutions focus on comfort, symptom control, psychosocial support, and quality of life for patients with serious or terminal illness.

By emergency role and referral function

Some hospitals operate emergency departments, trauma centers, intensive care units, or national referral services. A hospital’s designation should reflect actual capability, including staffing, equipment, protocols, transport arrangements, and continuous availability—not merely its title.

4. Core Functions of a Hospital

Patient care

The central function is the provision of preventive, promotive, diagnostic, therapeutic, rehabilitative, palliative, and emergency care. Patient care includes clinical assessment, treatment, nursing, medication management, nutrition, counseling, discharge planning, and follow-up.

Public health and prevention

Hospitals contribute to immunization, screening, surveillance, outbreak response, health education, maternal and child health, and reporting of notifiable diseases. Hospital administrators must ensure that clinical services are connected to community health priorities.

Education and training

Teaching hospitals train current and future healthcare workers. Effective educational administration requires approved curricula, qualified supervisors, safe learning environments, clear competency standards, and protection of patients from inappropriate or unsupervised procedures.

Research and innovation

Hospitals may conduct clinical, health-services, epidemiological, operational, and quality-improvement research. Research involving people requires scientific review, ethics approval where applicable, informed consent, confidentiality, and appropriate data governance.

Support and hospitality services

Clinical care depends on non-clinical services: cleaning, laundry, catering, security, transport, maintenance, biomedical engineering, medical records, information technology, procurement, finance, human resources, and waste management. Administrative failure in these areas can produce clinical harm.

Resource stewardship

Hospitals must use scarce resources responsibly. Stewardship includes budgeting, procurement, inventory control, energy management, workforce deployment, maintenance, and prevention of waste, fraud, and avoidable duplication.

5. Evolution of Hospitals and Hospital Administration

Early institutions often developed from religious charities, almshouses, military facilities, and places of refuge. Their functions were frequently custodial rather than curative. Care was provided by religious workers, families, apprentices, and traditional practitioners, while scientific diagnosis and infection control were limited.

During the nineteenth century, advances in anesthesia, antisepsis, microbiology, surgery, nursing, statistics, and public health transformed hospitals. Hospitals increasingly became centers of diagnosis and treatment rather than simply shelters for the poor. Professional nursing and medical education also expanded.

The twentieth century brought antibiotics, blood transfusion, imaging, intensive care, organ transplantation, modern laboratory science, health insurance, and government financing. Hospitals became larger and more specialized. This expansion created the need for professional administrators skilled in budgeting, personnel management, facilities planning, legal compliance, and health information.

Contemporary hospitals are moving from isolated, institution-centered models toward integrated systems. Care is increasingly distributed across primary-care clinics, specialist practices, ambulatory centers, home care, telehealth, rehabilitation, and community services. Hospitals remain essential for complex and urgent care, but they must coordinate with other parts of the health system.

The evolution has created tensions. Technological capability may improve treatment but increase cost. Specialization may improve expertise but fragment care. Digital records may improve information access but create privacy and cybersecurity risks. Modern administration therefore requires both operational competence and systems thinking.

6. Levels of Care and Referral Relationships

Primary care

Primary care is usually the first point of contact for individuals and families. It includes health promotion, prevention, common illness management, maternal and child services, immunization, chronic-disease care, and referral when necessary. Primary care is often delivered in community clinics, family practices, health centers, and outpatient departments.

Secondary care

Secondary care provides specialist assessment and hospital-based services for conditions that exceed primary-care capability. It commonly includes general surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics, pediatrics, diagnostic imaging, laboratory services, and inpatient care.

Tertiary care

Tertiary care provides highly specialized services requiring advanced expertise, technology, and multidisciplinary teams. Examples include intensive care, cardiac surgery, neurosurgery, oncology, neonatal intensive care, and complex trauma management.

Quaternary care

Quaternary care is an extension of tertiary care involving rare, highly complex, experimental, or exceptionally specialized services. It may include advanced transplantation, selected genomic therapies, complex reconstructive procedures, or highly specialized research-based interventions. Not every health system formally uses this term.

Referral and counter-referral

A referral system directs patients to the level best able to meet their needs. Counter-referral returns the patient to a lower or more appropriate level once specialized assessment or treatment is complete. Effective referral requires clinical information, transport arrangements, communication, appointment coordination, feedback, and responsibility for follow-up.

A hospital that accepts referrals without adequate capacity may create unsafe delays. Conversely, unnecessary referral can overload higher-level services and increase cost. Administrators should monitor referral appropriateness, waiting time, transfer delays, rejected referrals, and continuity after discharge.

Figure: The health system should support movement to higher expertise when necessary and return to appropriate continuing care when possible.

7. Hospitals within the Healthcare System

A healthcare system includes people, institutions, financing mechanisms, technologies, regulations, and activities intended to promote, restore, and maintain health. Hospitals are only one component. Their performance depends on relationships with primary care, public-health agencies, laboratories, pharmacies, insurers, social-care organizations, emergency services, professional bodies, suppliers, and communities.

The hospital–community relationship is reciprocal. Hospitals respond to community disease patterns and social needs, while hospital services influence employment, local economies, public confidence, and health outcomes. Administrators should use population data, service-utilization patterns, patient feedback, and community consultation when planning services.

Financing strongly shapes hospital behavior. Tax-funded, social-insurance, private-insurance, out-of-pocket, and mixed systems create different incentives and access barriers. Administrators must understand payer contracts, reimbursement rules, eligibility, billing controls, and the ethical difference between financial management and inappropriate denial of necessary care.

Hospitals also depend on supply chains. Medicines, blood products, oxygen, food, sterile supplies, fuel, information technology, and maintenance services must be available when needed. A low purchase price is not necessarily the lowest total cost if it produces poor quality, stock-outs, or equipment failure.

8. Stakeholders and Their Roles

Stakeholders are people or groups that affect, or are affected by, the hospital.

Stakeholder interests may conflict. Patients may want immediate access, clinicians may seek more diagnostic capacity, payers may emphasize cost control, and administrators may face fixed budgets. Ethical administration does not eliminate all conflict; it makes decision criteria transparent, lawful, evidence-informed, and centered on patient welfare and equity.

9. Responsibilities and Competencies of Hospital Administrators

Strategic and operational planning

Administrators translate mission into measurable priorities. Strategic planning may address service development, workforce, infrastructure, quality, digital transformation, financial sustainability, and community needs. Operational planning converts these priorities into schedules, budgets, responsibilities, indicators, and timelines.

Organizing and coordination

Hospitals require clear reporting relationships, delegated authority, committee structures, policies, and coordination across departments. Administrators should reduce unnecessary duplication while preserving appropriate professional accountability.

Human-resource management

Responsibilities include workforce planning, recruitment, orientation, credential verification, performance development, occupational safety, labor relations, retention, succession planning, and staff well-being. Staffing should reflect workload, acuity, competence, legal requirements, and service continuity—not merely a fixed staff-to-bed ratio.

Financial management

Administrators participate in budgeting, cost control, revenue-cycle management, procurement, audit, financial reporting, and investment decisions. Financial information should support clinical priorities rather than distort them. Fraud prevention and segregation of duties are essential controls.

Quality and patient safety

Quality management includes standards, indicators, audits, incident reporting, root-cause analysis, infection prevention, medication safety, clinical review, patient complaints, and improvement projects. A just culture distinguishes human error, risky system design, at-risk behavior, and deliberate misconduct; responses should be fair and proportionate.

Legal and regulatory compliance

Hospitals must comply with licensing rules, professional regulation, labor law, public-health requirements, building and fire codes, data-protection obligations, research rules, procurement law, and reporting duties. Administrators should obtain appropriate legal advice rather than treating compliance as a paperwork exercise.

Communication and negotiation

Administrators communicate with staff, patients, boards, regulators, media, and external partners. Important competencies include active listening, conflict resolution, negotiation, writing, presentation, cultural humility, and crisis communication. Trust is easily damaged by secrecy, inconsistent messages, or failure to acknowledge uncertainty.

Data and digital competence

Modern administrators use electronic health records, dashboards, scheduling systems, financial systems, workforce platforms, and incident-reporting tools. They must understand data quality, access control, privacy, cybersecurity, interoperability, and the limitations of performance indicators.

Professional competencies

A competent hospital administrator demonstrates:

• systems thinking;
• ethical and patient-centered judgment;
• planning and prioritization;
• financial and analytical literacy;
• leadership and teamwork;
• knowledge of healthcare law and regulation;
• quality-improvement capability;
• change-management skills;
• cultural competence and commitment to equity;
• resilience and reflective practice.

Competence is not only personal knowledge. It also includes the ability to build reliable systems, develop others, recognize risk, and seek expert advice when a matter exceeds one’s authority.

10. Ethics, Governance, and Accountability

Hospital administration is a moral as well as technical activity. Common ethical principles include respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. These principles must be applied to consent, confidentiality, resource allocation, access, research, end-of-life care, disability, and treatment refusal.

Patient autonomy requires understandable information, voluntary choice, and respect for lawful decisions. Confidentiality requires limiting access to information to legitimate purposes. Justice requires attention to fair access and avoidance of discrimination based on wealth, gender, age, disability, ethnicity, diagnosis, or social status.

Good governance includes a clear mission, competent oversight, conflict-of-interest management, transparent decision-making, internal controls, risk registers, independent audit, complaint mechanisms, and public accountability. Administrators should disclose and manage conflicts, especially in procurement, recruitment, contracting, and referral arrangements.

Artificial intelligence and automated decision tools may assist scheduling, documentation, imaging support, forecasting, and quality surveillance. However, they can reproduce bias, expose confidential data, generate inaccurate outputs, or obscure responsibility. Human oversight, validation, explainability appropriate to the use, cybersecurity, informed governance, and monitoring for unequal effects are necessary. AI should support—not replace—professional accountability and patient rights.

11. Practical Indicators for Hospital Administration

Indicators should be linked to decisions and interpreted in context. Examples include emergency waiting time, hospital-acquired infection rate, medication errors, readmission rate, patient complaints, staff turnover, absenteeism, stock-out frequency, average length of stay, operating-room utilization, and budget variance.

A commonly used utilization indicator is the bed occupancy rate:

In this expression, inpatient service days are the total number of occupied bed-days during the period, and available bed-days are the number of staffed and operational beds multiplied by the number of days in the period. The measure assumes that the numerator and denominator cover the same units, dates, and bed category. It should not treat closed or unstaffed beds as available.

Illustrative example: A 50-bed ward has all beds staffed for 30 days, giving 1,500 available bed-days. If patients occupy 1,200 bed-days:

Bed occupancy rate = (1,200 ÷ 1,500) × 100 = 80%.

High occupancy may indicate efficient use, but persistently excessive occupancy can cause congestion, cancellations, infection risk, and unsafe workloads. A low rate may indicate excess capacity, poor referral flow, seasonal variation, or access barriers. No indicator should be interpreted in isolation.

12. Applied Case: Improving Coordination in Riverside District Hospital

This is an illustrative case. Riverside District Hospital is a 180-bed public hospital serving a mixed urban and rural population. It provides emergency, medical, surgical, maternity, pediatric, and limited intensive-care services. The hospital has experienced rising emergency-department crowding, delayed discharges, cancelled elective operations, and complaints that families receive contradictory information.

Background and problem

An internal review found that discharge decisions were often made late in the day, inpatient notes were incomplete, pharmacy reconciliation was delayed, and community clinics were not consistently informed. Beds were occupied by patients who no longer required acute inpatient treatment, while emergency patients waited for admission. Departments blamed one another, and no single manager owned the entire patient flow.

Analysis

The administrator mapped the patient journey from emergency arrival to discharge. The analysis identified four interacting causes: unclear discharge criteria, poor multidisciplinary communication, limited weekend pharmacy and transport coverage, and weak referral feedback from community providers. The problem was therefore a system problem, not simply an individual performance failure.

Approach and solution

The hospital introduced a daily multidisciplinary flow meeting involving nursing, medical staff, pharmacy, social work, bed management, and finance. Each inpatient was assigned an expected discharge date and documented barriers. A discharge checklist included medication reconciliation, follow-up appointment, patient education, transport, and communication with the receiving provider. The hospital also created an escalation process for delayed tests and established a standard electronic discharge summary.

The administrator negotiated with community clinics to create a referral and counter-referral protocol. Weekend arrangements were piloted for pharmacy and transport. Staff were trained to explain discharge plans using plain language and to involve families early, while respecting patient consent and confidentiality.

Outcome

After three months, the hospital reported fewer delayed discharges, improved completeness of discharge summaries, and reduced elective-operation cancellations. Emergency waiting time improved, although seasonal demand continued to create pressure. The hospital recognized that the intervention required continuous monitoring rather than a one-time policy.

Learning points

1. Patient flow crosses departmental boundaries and needs shared ownership.
2. Administrative delays can become clinical safety risks.
3. Measurement should include access, safety, patient experience, and staff workload.
4. Counter-referral is essential for continuity after discharge.
5. Sustainable improvement requires frontline participation, leadership support, and feedback.

13. Challenges and Best Practices

Hospitals face rising chronic disease, aging populations, workforce shortages, antimicrobial resistance, emergencies, financial pressure, unequal access, cyber threats, climate-related disruption, and rapid technological change. These pressures are intensified when governance is weak or information systems are fragmented.

Best practices include:

• define mission, authority, and accountability clearly;
• place patient safety and dignity at the center of decisions;
• use multidisciplinary governance and frontline participation;
• base planning on population needs and reliable data;
• maintain emergency preparedness and business continuity plans;
• integrate quality improvement into routine management;
• protect confidentiality and cybersecurity;
• develop staff through supervision, education, and fair performance systems;
• maintain transparent procurement and financial controls;
• coordinate with primary care and community services;
• evaluate innovations for effectiveness, equity, safety, and sustainability.

Chapter Summary

Hospital administration is the coordinated direction and management of clinical, support, financial, informational, human, and physical resources to achieve safe, effective, ethical, accessible, and sustainable care. Hospitals are open systems whose performance depends on inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes, and feedback.

Hospitals may be classified by ownership, service scope, level of care, teaching role, duration of care, and referral function. Their core functions include patient care, public health, education, research, support services, and resource stewardship. Historically, hospitals developed from charitable and custodial institutions into technologically advanced centers embedded in wider health systems.

Primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary care represent increasing levels of specialization. Effective referral and counter-referral systems protect continuity and prevent inappropriate concentration of patients. Stakeholders include patients, families, professionals, governing bodies, regulators, payers, suppliers, communities, and academic partners.

Hospital administrators require systems thinking, ethical judgment, financial and data literacy, communication, quality-improvement ability, legal awareness, workforce competence, and leadership. Their work must balance access, quality, safety, equity, patient rights, and financial sustainability. Good administration is therefore both an operational discipline and a public responsibility.

Key Terms

Hospital administration: Professional coordination and management of hospital resources and services.

Governance: Direction, oversight, accountability, and control of an organization.

Open system: An organization that exchanges resources, information, and influences with its environment.

Clinical governance: Structures and processes for maintaining and improving care quality and safety.

Patient safety: Prevention of avoidable harm associated with healthcare.

Inpatient: A patient formally admitted for hospital care.

Outpatient: A patient receiving care without formal inpatient admission.

Triage: Prioritization of patients according to urgency and need.

Referral: Direction or transfer of a patient to another provider or facility.

Counter-referral: Return of a patient to an appropriate lower or continuing level of care.

Primary care: First-contact, preventive, and general health services.

Secondary care: Specialist and general hospital services beyond primary care.

Tertiary care: Highly specialized services requiring advanced expertise and technology.

Quaternary care: Exceptionally complex or rare specialized care.

Case mix: The range and complexity of conditions treated by a hospital.

Credentialing: Verification of professional qualifications and authorization.

Accreditation: External recognition that standards are met.

Stakeholder: A person or group affected by or able to affect the hospital.

Bed occupancy rate: Occupied inpatient bed-days expressed as a percentage of available bed-days.

Just culture: A fair approach that distinguishes system failure, human error, risky conduct, and deliberate misconduct.

Review Questions

Short Answer Questions

1. Define hospital administration and distinguish it from governance.
2. State four major functions of a hospital.
3. What is the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary care?
4. Define referral and counter-referral.
5. List five competencies required by a hospital administrator.

Long Answer Questions

1. Explain the open-systems view of a hospital, using examples of inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes, and feedback.
2. Discuss the major ways in which hospitals may be classified and explain why classification is multidimensional.
3. Describe the historical evolution of hospitals and its implications for modern administration.
4. Explain the roles of major hospital stakeholders and discuss how their interests may conflict.
5. Discuss the ethical, governance, and legal responsibilities of hospital administrators.

Analytical / Application Questions

1. A district hospital has high emergency waiting times despite having adequate physical beds. Using systems thinking, identify possible causes and propose an investigation plan.
2. A hospital plans to introduce an artificial-intelligence tool for patient-risk prediction. What governance, ethical, data-protection, and clinical-safety issues should administrators assess before implementation?
3. A hospital’s bed occupancy rate is persistently 95%, but patient complaints and staff overtime are increasing. Analyze why high occupancy may not indicate good performance and recommend a balanced set of indicators.

Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

Which statement best describes hospital administration?

A. Only the preparation of financial statements

B. The coordination and management of resources and services to achieve hospital objectives

C. The independent clinical diagnosis of every patient

D. The replacement of professional medical judgment

Correct Answer: B. The coordination and management of resources and services to achieve hospital objectives

Question 2

Which of the following is primarily a governance responsibility?

A. Directly administering medication

B. Cleaning an operating theatre

C. Providing institutional oversight and accountability

D. Performing a laboratory test

Correct Answer: C. Providing institutional oversight and accountability

Question 3

Which level of care usually provides first-contact and preventive services?

A. Primary care

B. Secondary care

C. Tertiary care

D. Quaternary care

Correct Answer: A. Primary care

Question 4

What is counter-referral?

A. Refusing all specialist referrals

B. Returning a patient to an appropriate continuing level of care after specialized management

C. Transferring every patient to a tertiary hospital

D. Sending a hospital invoice to an insurer

Correct Answer: B. Returning a patient to an appropriate continuing level of care after specialized management

Question 5

Which is an example of a hospital support service?

A. Biomedical equipment maintenance

B. Clinical diagnosis only

C. Patient consent only

D. Professional licensing by a regulator

Correct Answer: A. Biomedical equipment maintenance

Question 6

A ward has 1,200 inpatient service days and 1,500 available bed-days. Using the stated formula, what is its bed occupancy rate?

A. 60%

B. 75%

C. 80%

D. 125%

Correct Answer: C. 80%

Question 7

Which framework distinguishes structure, process, and outcome in quality assessment?

A. The structure–process–outcome model

B. The counter-referral model

C. The ownership classification model

D. The procurement segregation model

Correct Answer: A. The structure–process–outcome model

Question 8

Which action best supports patient safety during discharge?

A. Discharging without follow-up information

B. Avoiding communication with community providers

C. Using medication reconciliation and a documented follow-up plan

D. Leaving discharge responsibility undefined

Correct Answer: C. Using medication reconciliation and a documented follow-up plan

Question 9

Why is stakeholder analysis important in hospital administration?

A. It eliminates the need for regulation

B. It identifies affected parties and helps manage differing interests and responsibilities

C. It ensures that only financial interests are considered

D. It replaces clinical governance

Correct Answer: B. It identifies affected parties and helps manage differing interests and responsibilities

Question 10

Which competency is most directly associated with responsible use of hospital data and digital tools?

A. Data literacy and understanding of privacy and cybersecurity

B. Avoidance of all performance measurement

C. Delegation of all decisions to software

D. Removal of access controls

Correct Answer: A. Data literacy and understanding of privacy and cybersecurity