The issue of patient safety has gained great salience in recent years. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have issued guidelines for coding conditions that are present on admission because Medicare will no longer pay the costs associated with certain hospital-acquired conditions. Poor medical outcomes such as postoperative complications represent large costs in terms of resource usage, quality of life, and, often, loss of productivity for the patients. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has spearheaded study of patient safety issues. The Veterans Administration (VA) has piloted an educational and accountability program for raising staff awareness of patient safety and improving medical outcomes. The IOM report and the VA program both work on the assumption that the organizational culture has an impact on medical outcomes in a number of ways. They both endorse removing the blame from patient safety programs and using the information proactively by creating a way to study medical complications, learn the connections among human actions, technical processes, systems limitations, and patient conditions that contribute to poor outcomes. However, there are very few studies taking a comprehensive view of these interactions exist and almost none of them look at all of the Health Care Utilization Project-defined organizational characteristics as they relate to medical outcomes. This study aspires to fill that gap and to provide a basis for more studies that include the organizational compositions of healthcare organizations as integral parts of the formative structure of these organizations.