Additions to Online Dashboard include data on labor and benefit costs, COVID-19 provider relief funds, and operating profit margins.  

An updated version of the Hospital Cost tool (HCT), a dashboard created in a partnership between Mathematica, Rice University’s Baker Institute and the National Academy for State Health Policy is now available with new data that provides a more granular look at factors behind increasing hospital prices. The 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. Mathematica led the dashboard design, development and data validation for this update.

The updated tool, HCT 2.0, provides analysis from almost 5,000 hospitals from 2020 and 2021 and includes new metrics on staffing cost data, hospital level COVID-19 provider relief funds, and operating profit margin visualizations. Refinements to the tool that will help its functionality include improved accuracy in excluding outliers/reporting errors, calculating net charity care which includes charity care grants, and assigning appropriate Medicare costs for organ acquisition. This will allow state regulators, employers, providers, and researchers to analyze hospital costs with more substantive visualizations of key metrics, such as hospital revenue, net income, profit margins, cost-to-charge ratio, and payer mixes.

“Hospital prices and margins rose to the top of health care policy agenda as COVID-19 pandemic shifted historical utilization patterns and increased operating costs,” said Sule Gerovich, a senior fellow at Mathematica.  “Having a comprehensive view of revenue, costs, and margins will be important for policy makers and purchasers to assess how price increases relates to increasing costs of providing services at hospitals.”

The improvements provide a thorough look at the problem from different angles. For example, states can now use the tool to examine to what extent the contracted labor for patient care have impacted hospital operating costs, or how much COVID-19 provider relief funds helped to maintain hospital margins during the pandemic.

“Since the tool’s initial release in the spring, state officials, employers and other health care payers, have used the analysis to expand their understanding of hospital costs and profits to inform policy directions and reimbursement negotiations. Now with two more years of information and expanded metrics, purchasers of care can better analyze cost trends,” said Maureen Hensley-Quinn, Senior Director, National Academy for State Health Policy.