About HospitalCostData
What does your hospital actually charge?
What we do
HospitalCostData pairs Medicare price data with CMS Hospital Compare quality measures so patients, families, and researchers can compare what hospitals charge against how they perform — on the same page, for the same facility, in the same dataset.
We focus on U.S. hospital prices, quality ratings, and Medicare outcomes. Every page on hospitalcostdata.com is built from the CMS Provider Data Catalog, CMS Hospital Compare, and the Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS), cited and linkable so readers can trace any number back to its source.
Who runs this
HospitalCostData is built and maintained by the HospitalCostData Team. We're a small group working on making public U.S. hospital prices, quality ratings, and Medicare outcomes data easier for non-specialists to read. If you have a correction, a data tip, or a question about how a number was derived, the contact email below reaches us directly.
Who this is for
HospitalCostData is built for patients, caregivers, employee-benefits staff, health-policy researchers, hospital executives, and reporters covering U.S. hospital pricing and quality.
Why this exists
Public data on U.S. hospital prices, quality ratings, and Medicare outcomes is technically free, but practically locked behind file formats, acronyms, and paywalled dashboards. HospitalCostDataexists to close that gap: take the raw federal and public-sector data, and turn it into pages a normal person can read in thirty seconds.
How we work
- Primary source only. We pull from the CMS Provider Data Catalog, CMS Hospital Compare, and the Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) and cite the exact dataset and version on every page.
- No invented numbers. If a figure is not in the underlying public data, it does not appear on hospitalcostdata.com. We never generate synthetic statistics to fill gaps.
- Methodology, in plain English. We combine the CMS Hospital Compare overall star rating with IPPS-reported DRG payment data to produce a per-hospital page showing what Medicare pays for common procedures alongside the quality measure bundle (mortality, safety, readmission) for the same facility. The HospitalCostData Value Score combines both halves into a single A-to-F grade per hospital. Full methodology and weighting are documented at /methodology.
- Refreshed on a schedule. Refreshed quarterly to align with CMS Hospital Compare updates and the annual IPPS payment-data release cycle. Per-procedure files refresh on the Medicare DRG release schedule (typically annually with mid-year revisions).
- Corrections welcome. Readers flag issues all the time. When the source fixes a record, HospitalCostData follows.
Known limitations
IPPS rates reflect Medicare inpatient pricing only — commercial-insurer rates, published under federal hospital price transparency rules, can differ sharply and are not reflected here. Star ratings use measure bundles with multi-year lookback windows, so the most recent quarter\'s performance is not captured. Hospital-specific patient mix (older, sicker patients vs. younger, healthier ones) affects raw mortality and readmission numbers; CMS adjusts for this in the headline ratings but the underlying measure tables expose the raw numbers as well.
Why combine cost and quality on the same page
The two most widely used U.S. hospital data products — Hospital Compare for quality, the IPPS files for cost — are published separately by CMS. Reading one without the other is reading half the story. A high-quality hospital that costs three times the national average is a different choice than one that costs the average; a cheap hospital with measurable safety problems is a different choice than one with average safety.
The HospitalCostData Value Score is our attempt to put both on the same page. The score combines the CMS Hospital Compare overall star rating (1-5) with the hospital's average Medicare payment per documented procedure, normalized against the national distribution. An A-grade hospital is one that combines above-average quality with at-or-below-average cost; an F-grade hospital is the inverse. The middle of the rubric (B/C/D) captures the various trade-offs in between.
The combined score is not a substitute for reading the underlying measures — patients with specific concerns (cardiac care, joint replacement, maternity) need to look at the procedure-specific data — but it is a defensible triage tool when starting from a list of facilities and trying to narrow down.
What this data cannot tell you
A few limits worth being explicit about. First, the IPPS payment data is Medicare-specific: the figures reflect what Medicare paid, not what a commercial insurer pays, and not what an uninsured patient is asked to pay (which is often a higher list price subject to financial-assistance discounts). For an apples-to-apples comparison across hospitals, the Medicare numbers are the most consistent benchmark; for your-specific-bill projections, they are an imperfect proxy.
Second, the Hospital Compare star rating is a composite of dozens of underlying measures. A 4-star hospital with strong mortality measures and weak readmission measures is meaningfully different from a 4-star hospital with the opposite profile. We surface the underlying measure counts on each hospital page so you can see which way the composite leans.
Third, CMS measures are facility-level: they reflect the hospital as a whole, not the specific doctor or team you would actually see. For elective procedures, surgeon-level outcomes data (sometimes available through state surgical-outcomes registries) is the more relevant signal, and is not in our dataset.
Why we built this
The data has been public for years. CMS publishes the Hospital Compare measures, the IPPS payment files, and the Provider Data Catalog continuously. None of it is hidden, all of it is downloadable, and any researcher with a few weeks and the right tooling can reproduce most of what we do here.
But the data is also, until you have spent serious time with it, opaque. The measure files live in dozens of separate downloads on the CMS Data website. The DRG payment files use code references documented in PDFs that have aged poorly. The same hospital appears under three slightly different name variants in three different files. The relationship between the IPPS files and the Hospital Compare files is not formally defined anywhere — you have to match on CMS Certification Number and hope the match is clean.
HospitalCostData exists to do that integration work once, score the result against a published rubric, and put a single page per hospital online — so anyone considering where to go for inpatient care can read it in five minutes without learning the federal data architecture.
Independence
HospitalCostData is an independent publication. We are not funded, owned, or directed by any of the agencies, companies, or organizations that appear in our data. Hosting is paid for by advertising — see our Privacy Policy for details — and we do not take paid placements, sponsored rankings, or "remove-my-entry" fees.
History
HospitalCostData launched in 2025 as part of a small portfolio of independent public-data sites. It has been maintained and updated continuously since.
Contact
Tips, corrections, data-partnership questions, and press inquiries: hello@hospitalcostdata.com. More options on our contact page.