People talk about all the philosophical differences, but the truth is that most people are comparing very small-scale nonprofit organizations to very large-scale for-profit corporations. If you compare organizations of comparable scale, you would find far fewer differences, it seems to me.
Just this week I blogged about the project being undertaken by the Kaiser health plan to convert to electronic medical records. The project is costing billions. The problems it is encountering have little to do with the fact that Kaiser is a nonprofit, but rather because of the unprecedented scale of the project.
Email Blasts Billion-Dollar IT Project at Nonprofit HMO http://www.wheremostneeded.org/2007/04/email_blasts_bi.html
The problem Prof. Fitch described are also related to scale. A larger scale organization would have less difficulty developing software to address multiple eligibility criteria, because it would be able to maintain sufficient internal resources to do the integration. For that matter, an even larger scale organization would have access to resources to negotiate or lobby for a more manageable system of eligibility criteria. It has nothing to do with the organization's nonprofit status, it has to do with the scale of the enterprise.
Regards,
Dan Prives
Where Most Needed
The Charity Industry Blog
http://www.wheremostneeded.org
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