Compared with other hospitals, public hospitals are generally assumed to face multiple barriers to providing high-quality care: lower revenues; sicker patients who may have infrequent contact with the health care system; and an older infrastructure, particularly related to health information technology. A new case study series set out to find how some public hospitals have succeeded in achieving excellence in quality of care, in spite of such challenges. Researchers used data from The Commonwealth Fund's performance benchmarking Web site, WhyNotTheBest.org, to evaluate public hospitals' performance. The cases studies are:
