The Hospital Cost Tool Makes It Easier to Understand Health Care Costs and Pricing

Purpose

The National Academy for State Health Policy’s (NASHP) Hospital Cost Tool (HCT) dashboard aims to provide state policymakers and researchers with analytical insights into how much hospitals spend on patient care services, and how such costs relate to the hospital charges (list prices) and actual prices paid by health plans. The dashboard reports on a range of measures for hospital revenue, costs, profitability, and break-even points across over 5,000 hospitals nationwide for the period from 2011 through 2022. Users can view the data at the hospital, state, and health system levels. The underlying HCT dataset includes more than 100 variables extracted and calculated using data from the national Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS) as the main data source. Hospitals in this dataset represent approximately 64 million patient discharges and $36 billion hospital net income in the most recent reporting year.

The Hospital Cost Tool was developed and maintained through a partnership between the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), Rice University’s Baker Institute, and Mathematica.

For more information about the Hospital Cost Tool, please contact: Evelyn Li or Sule Gerovich.