Understanding the Safety Net: Inpatient Quality of Care Varies Based on How One Defines Safety-Net Hospitals

The quality of care at safety-net hospitals—which serve many poor, publicly insured, and uninsured patients—varies depending on the criteria used to identify such hospitals, this study finds. Using threedifferent, commonly used classification methods, the researchers came up with three very different sets of results. Public or teaching hospitals had lower performance scores on four “process of care” measures than did private, nonteaching hospitals, but results were mixed for safety-net hospitals identified by the level of uncompensated care they provide. Read More