A four-cell typology to measure hospital teaching status.

Hospital participation in graduate medical education is of increasing interest in the health policy arena because of its financial and behavioral implications for hospitals. In this attempt to create a more refined method of measuring hospital teaching status, a four-cell classification, or typology, of all nonfederal short-term general teaching hospitals was developed from 11 descriptors of educational output. This typology proved to be both effective in distinguishing different types of teaching institutions and useful in analyzing interhospital variation in scope of services, case mix, and cost.