Hospital Cost-to-Charge Ratio Benchmark (CMS HCRIS)

An independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by CMS or any hospital whose cost report it reads. All data is read live from CMS's own published HCRIS Hospital 2552-10 cost report release, never scraped from any patient-facing site.

Give it a batch of hospitals (each named by its own CMS Certification Number, CCN) and a fiscal year; get back, for each hospital, its own cost-to-charge ratio for that year -- how much it costs the hospital to deliver a dollar of billed charges -- and where that ratio sits against every other hospital in your batch: a percentile rank, plus the batch median/min/max.

What is a CCN, and how do I find one?

The CMS Certification Number is the 6-character public identifier every Medicare-participating hospital has, e.g. 010001. It is the same identifier CMS's own Hospital Compare / Care Compare site, cost reports, and most healthcare-price-transparency tooling already use. To look one up: search "<hospital name> CMS certification number" or check CMS's own Provider of Services file / Care Compare site (https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/), which lists each hospital's CCN alongside its name and address.

Why this is hard, and why that is the point

CMS ships one bulk release covering every hospital's cost report at once -- there is no per-hospital lookup endpoint, so this Actor downloads and joins the whole release on every run. About 1 in 5 hospitals in a typical fiscal year (Critical Access Hospitals and other providers not paid under a Prospective Payment System) simply do not have a cost figure in this extract, and this Actor tells you so plainly rather than guessing. A hospital's own fiscal year does not always align to the calendar, so some hospitals have more than one report row in the same fiscal-year bucket; this Actor always picks the most recent filing period and tells you exactly which one it used. The ratio itself is not handed over directly by CMS -- it is derived from two raw columns and checked against a plausibility range, because a small share of real cost reports contain data-entry errors (a charges figure near zero, or a misplaced decimal) that would otherwise produce a nonsensical ratio.

What it returns

For each hospital: hospital_ccn, hospital_label (a name you choose, falling back to CMS's own registered name) and hospital_registered_label (CMS's own registered facility name, verbatim), street_address/city/state/zip_code/county, fiscal_year/fiscal_year_begin_date/fiscal_year_end_date/ report_status (so you can see exactly which filing period and settlement status the figure came from), cost_to_charge_ratio, and the shared benchmark figures: peer_percentile_rank (0 = cheapest in your batch, 100 = most expensive), batch_median, batch_min, batch_max, and batch_sample_size (how many hospitals in your batch actually had a usable ratio).

What it does not do, on purpose

It never charges for a single hospital's ratio as if it were a comparison -- a batch with only one hospital having a usable ratio is delivered free, with the reason; add more hospitals to turn it into a real benchmark. It never fabricates a ratio for a hospital whose cost report does not support one (a Critical Access Hospital with a blank cost column, a hospital with zero reported charges, or a computed ratio outside a plausible range) -- each is delivered free, with the specific reason, rather than silently dropped or guessed at. It does not attempt number_of_beds, fte_employees or total_discharges -- those live on a different worksheet of the cost report not included in this release, and this Actor will not invent a number it cannot trace to a real, verified source column.