Teaching Hospital

What is a Teaching Hospital?

Teaching hospitals educate medical students, residents, and other healthcare professionals who are finishing or continuing medical education.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) designates hospitals as teaching hospitals if they submitted Open Payments to CMS for Medicare direct graduate medical education (GME), IPPS indirect medical education (IME), or psychiatric hospital IME programs during the last calendar year.

How are teaching hospitals different than Academic Medical Centers?

Teaching hospitals are usually associated with a medical school and provide medical education and training to healthcare providers but do not necessarily issue medical degrees. Academic medical centers (AMCs) are affiliated with medical schools and confer medical degrees. Most AMCs are also teaching hospitals, but not all teaching hospitals are AMCs.

As of December 2023, there are over 1,300 teaching hospitals in HospitalView and just over 200 hospitals designated as AMCs. 196 of those hospitals are both an AMC and a teaching hospital.

Do you get better care at a teaching hospital?

There are several studies that provide evidence concluding that teaching hospitals have better overall patient outcomes than non-teaching and community hospitals. Additionally, teaching hospitals focus a lot of their resources on medical education and research, which can lead to access to cutting-edge treatments and specialists.

Although measuring the quality of care of a hospital can be challenging, teaching hospitals are often a good option when seeking serious medical treatment due to their highly experienced personnel and easy access to Level 1 trauma centers.