San Francisco General Hospital

The Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (ZSFG) 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 (UCSF) provides approximately 1,500 employees (including physicians, nurses and ancillary personnel), 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 7.35% 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. As of 2014, 92 percent of the patient population at SFGH either receives publicly funded health insurance (Medicare or Medi-Cal) or is uninsured. SFGH is rare in that its emergency rooms do not have agreements in place with private health care insurance providers. Until 2019, privately insured patients were often billed the balance of their care, which could be sizable. This practice was changed after media attention regarding the hospital's billing practices.