Healing Hands Hospital is an acute care community hospital that serves a suburban community outside of a large city with two competing large academic medical centers.

Both Healing Hands Hospital and the academic medical centers have a long history of service to the region, but their business and fundamental practices are different.

Your manager, Ms. Woods, Healing Hands' Chief Operating Officer, is part of the Task Force working on the strategic plan for the hospital and needs to understand the fundamental practices of these academic medical centers.

You have been asked to research the differences between the services that your organization offers and those of at least one of these academic medical centers. For the purposes of this assignment, use the Web to research community hospitals and academic medical centers and select one community hospital and one academic medical center located in the same city or area to represent these two healthcare organizations for the purpose of working on this assignment.

You will use the information that you find about these two healthcare organizations for the Individual Project assignments in the remaining weeks of the course culminating in your final project in Week 5. Use the acute-care community hospital to represent Healing Hands Hospital. This link provides a list of example community hospitals.

Choose one and then find an academic medical center located in the same geographic region.

Review the Web information on these facilities to complete this assignment.

1. Describe the similarities and differences of these organizations in terms of the following:

Mission Goals Objectives Management structure Reimbursement models Staffing Policies Procedures Research and clinical trials

2. Based on your analysis of the data that you present, provide your opinion on what would be the main areas of concern if the two organizations were to merge and how they could be overcome.

You may include a table for the comparison data, but you must describe your evaluation of where there are and are not similarities between the two healthcare organizations and your opinion.