Funding Decisions Your Board Can Follow, Request by Request

A 30-minute session for hospital and health system foundations on building a funding process where every decision comes with its own record: the request, the criteria, the scores and the outcome.

In 2022, nonprofit hospitals reported $94 billion in community benefit, or up to $121 billion counting bad debt. A Johns Hopkins study published in The Milbank Quarterly in July 2025 found that the totals shift dramatically depending on what's included, because there's no standardized definition. Its conclusion: meaningful accountability means measuring both sides of the equation.

Hospital foundations work inside that same push for accountability. Boards, donors and community partners want to know how much was given, and they also want to know why.

This session is built around two of the five dimensions of Review Integrity, a framework for judging whether an application and review process is fair, consistent and defensible.

The first is Decision Traceability: can any decision be reconstructed and defended? If a board member pointed to any request you funded, could you show the request, the criteria it was scored against, who scored it, and why it was chosen over the others?

The second is Reviewer Calibration: were reviewers kept off requests they're connected to, and did they score the same way? Grant committees of physicians, executives, board members and community leaders often know the people asking, and one tough or generous scorer can quietly tip the outcome.

When requests arrive by email, scores sit in a spreadsheet and the committee's reasoning lives in someone's notes, every question about a past decision has to be answered by rebuilding it. Declined partners don't learn what would make their next request stronger. Donors can't see how their gifts were directed. And when the grants manager who ran the process leaves, the reasons behind past decisions can leave too.

The record behind a funding decision has to be built while the review happens. The best time to set it up is before your next grant cycle opens, when you're deciding what the application asks, how requests are scored and who reviews them.

In this 30-minute session, you'll learn how to:

• Build request forms that ask each applicant to name the priority, community need and population their request serves
• Screen out ineligible or incomplete requests before they reach your committee
• Score every request against the same weighted criteria, with the request and the scorecard side by side
• Decide which reviewers see which requests, so you can keep people off requests they're connected to
• Spot a harsh or lenient scorer before their scores tip the outcome
• Hide applicant names and other identifying form fields when you want a blind review
• Keep each request, its scores, reviewer comments and its final status together in one record
• Collect grantee reports and receipts after the award
• Download results and reports for your board packet
• Carry every applicant's history and your program setup into the next cycle, so the process doesn't depend on one person

Who should attend

Hospital and health system foundation presidents and executive directors, grants managers, community benefit staff, and the board and committee members who review and approve funding requests. It's especially useful for foundations where one or two people run the whole grant process.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the recording.

Common questions

Does Reviewr pay grantees or track fund balances?No. Reviewr runs the request, review and selection, and collects grantee reports and receipts after the award. It doesn't disburse funds or track fund balances, so your finance system stays the system of record. You can export a recipient report for your finance team.

Is Reviewr secure enough for a health system?Reviewr is SOC 2 Type II certified. It isn't a HIPAA-compliant system, so funding applications shouldn't collect patient health information.

We already review requests in committee meetings. What changes?The meeting can stay. What changes is that each request's criteria, scores, reviewer comments and outcome are captured as the review happens, so the record is there when someone asks later.