Sepsis quality in safety-net hospitals: an analysis of Medicare's SEP-1 performance measure.
Hospital policies should help guide the quality of care and efforts to prevent harm. This study examined the impact of the policies that require hospitals to engage in sepsis quality improvement on safety net hospitals. The 703 safety-net hospitals performed worse on the CMS SEP-1 quality measure and this association was most evident in hospitals not affiliated with health systems. The authors concluded existing sepsis policies may harm safety-net hospitals and widen health disparities.