title: Safety-net hospitals.
abstract: Vulnerable populations, who have difficulty accessing the health care system, primarily receive their medical care from hospitals. Policy makers have struggled to ensure the survival of "safety-net hospitals," hospitals that provide a disproportionate share of care to these patient populations. The objective of this article is to develop measures to guide analysis and policy for urban safety-net hospitals. The authors developed three safety-net measures: the socioeconomic status of hospital service area, Medicaid intensity, and uncompensated care burden and its market share. Cluster analysis was used to identify break points that distinguish a safety-net hospital from a non-safety-net hospital. The measures developed were stable and independent, but a data-driven binary assignment of hospitals to a "safety-net" category was not supported. These analyses call into question the empirical basis for distinguishing a specific group of hospitals as safety-net hospitals.
authors.affiliation: University of Illinois at Chicago.
authors.forename: Jack
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zwanziger
authors.forename: Nasreen
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Khan
mesh_terms: D002391:Catchment Area, Health; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006786:Hospitals, Urban; D006801:Humans; D008484:Medicaid / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D017057:Medically Uninsured; D010067:Ownership; D012923:Social Class; D017664:Uncompensated Care; D014481:United States