Hospitals compete with other hospitals – compete for patients, compete for physicians, compete for resources, and compete for recognition. To compete effectively, hospitals need to understand their competitors – their strengths and their weaknesses, their assets and their liabilities.

One of the best tools for competing, and for understanding your competitors, is a comparative analysis. With data from the Medicare cost reports of every hospital in the country going back many years, DeBrunner & Associates can perform the kind of comparative analysis that hospitals need to ensure their competitiveness.

Among the financial data DeBrunner can provide – for you and any competitors you designate – are:

• Profitability measures like total margin, operating margin, cash flow margin, and return on equity.
• Liquidity measures like current ratio, days cash on hand, and net days revenue in accounts receivable.
• Capital structure measures like equity financing, debt service coverage, and long-term debt to capitalization.
• Revenue measures like patient revenue, operating revenue, outpatient revenues to total revenues, patient deductions, Medicare payments and days, Medicare inpatient payer mix, Medicare DSH revenue, Medicare outpatient payer mix, Medicare outpatient cost-to-charge, Medicare revenue per day, operating PPS payment estimates, capital PPS payment estimates, Medicaid payments and days, and Medicaid revenue per day.
• Cost measures like salaries to total expenses, comparative wage data, charges by cost center, uncompensated care costs, average age of plant, and FTEs per adjusted occupied bed.
• Utilization measures like average daily census per swing/SNF bed and average daily census per acute bed.

In each case, you can custom-select the peer group for which you want data: your hospital and your nearest competitor, every hospital serving your community, every hospital in your city or region, even every hospital in your state. You choose.

Such data has a myriad of uses. Wage data, for example, can be used in labor negotiations and recruiting. Cost and revenue data can be useful when negotiating contracts. All of this data can help inform decisions about mergers and acquisitions.

DeBrunner also can provide service-related data – again, for whatever peer group you wish. Available data elements include:

• average daily census
• discharges
• case-mix index

These and other data elements can help hospital officials make critical decisions about expanding (or contracting) their service offerings, establishing new satellite locations and outpatient facilities, and more.

Interested in exploring some of the data listed? Looking for something that is not listed? Feel free to ask us here.