San Francisco General Hospital


The Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center is a public hospital in San Francisco, California under the purview of the city's Department of Public Health. It serves as the only Level I Trauma Center for the 1.5 million residents of San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. It is the largest acute inpatient and rehabilitation hospital for psychiatric patients in the city. Additionally, it is the only acute hospital in San Francisco that provides 24-hour psychiatric emergency services.
In addition to the approximately 3,500 San Francisco municipal employees, the University of California, San Francisco provides approximately 1,500 employees, and the SFGH serves as one of the teaching hospitals for the UCSF School of Medicine. The hospital, especially its Ward 86, was instrumental in treating and identifying early cases of AIDS. A new San Francisco General Hospital acute care building was completed in 2016 for a total approximate cost of $1.02 billion. A $75 million donation by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan covered approximately 7% of the overall cost. In recognition, the hospital was renamed after the couple.
The hospital is a safety net hospital additionally serving poor, elderly people, uninsured working families, and immigrants. About 80 percent of its patient population either receives publicly funded health insurance or is uninsured. SFGH also cares for the homeless, who make up about 8 percent of its patients.
SFGH is rare in that its emergency rooms do not have agreements in place with private health care insurance providers. Through 2019, privately insured patients were often billed the balance of their care, which could be sizable. This practice was changed after media attention.

Timeline

The following events occurred for this hospital:
Through early 2019, SFGH did not participate in any private health insurance networks and practiced balance billing. A Vox analysis characterized the hospital's billing practices as "aggressive" and "surprising": one privately insured patient arriving at the hospital after a bicycle accident was billed more than $20,000 for diagnostic scans and treatment for a broken arm; the bill was 12 times the Medicare billing rate. After media attention, SFGH changed its billing policy so that privately insured patients would be billed at rates consistent with the their insurers' network rates, with an income-based maximum.

Artwork

The hospital owns and displays two paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, donated to the hospital by Dr. Leo Eloesser. Eloesser interned at SFGH and was Kahlo's physician.
The Pediatric Emergency Department features a mural by artist Sirron Norris entitled The Land of the Helping Hand, which features local iconography.

Notable deaths