How to read these pages

Each page here is built from one public file. The file is named at the foot of the page, together with the date its publisher stamped inside it — not the date we happened to read it, which is usually a day later and would date every fact on the page wrongly.

Where the file prints a value, this site prints the same value. Where the file prints nothing, this site shows nothing: no estimate, and no number carried in from somewhere else to fill the space.

A record’s history is the difference between one day’s file and the next. These pages show what changed and the date of the file that first showed it. They do not show when the change was made inside the publisher’s own system, because the file does not say.

Nothing here is an opinion about the 340B Drug Pricing Program, its rules, or anyone taking part in it. The figures are the record; the reader draws the conclusions.

What each page shows

A record page carries the identity as filed, participation and the dates attached to it, the identifiers the register holds, the locations registered under the record, and the pharmacy contracts filed against it. Underneath, every change the report has shown since this site began reading it.

Where the file prints a value, the page prints the same value and names the file it came from. Where the file prints nothing, the page shows nothing.

Two dates that are not the same

Every date on this site is the one the publisher stamped inside the file. The report is generated overnight and served unchanged for the rest of the day, so the day a file is read is usually the day after the date it carries. Dating a fact by the reading would move it by a day for no reason.

Participation, and dates in the future

The participation flag is the state as at the file’s own date, and the two date columns beside it may point into the future. A record can read as participating and carry a termination date, which means a termination already scheduled; and it can read as not participating with no termination date, which means a registration that has not started. Neither is a contradiction, and both are printed as filed.

Hospital finances, and the one figure that is divided

Where a hospital files a Medicare cost report, its record carries the figures from that report: net patient revenue, operating expenses, income from service to patients, charity care at charges and at cost, bad debt, uncompensated care and the bed count. Each is printed as the form printed it, with the worksheet, line and column beside it.

Uncompensated care, share of operating expenses is the one figure on this site that is divided rather than copied. It is the cost of uncompensated care divided by total operating expenses, both taken from the same filing and both printed on the form, expressed as a percentage to two decimal places. Where the filing does not carry both, the share is not shown. It appears in one place, the table of hospital finances, where hospitals are read next to each other. A hospital’s own page carries the two filed figures and not the division: on a single record a share reads as a statement about that hospital, and this site does not make one.

Three further shares are divided the same way, each from two figures on the same filing: charity care as a share of net patient revenue, uncompensated care as a share of net patient revenue, and what was left after the cost of care — income from serving patients as a share of net patient revenue. Where a filing does not carry both figures, or where patient revenue is not a positive number, the share is not shown.

A benchmark is a distribution, not an order. Where this site gives a midpoint, a middle half, or a tenth-to-ninetieth range, it is describing a population of hospitals: how many were counted, and what the cost-report years were. Those figures are computed once, written down with the population they were taken over, and read from there — they are never worked out on the page. A cut covering fewer than eight hospitals is not published at all, because a quartile over three hospitals describes those three hospitals and nothing else.

A percentile is a position, not a score. Where a hospital’s page says it sits at a given percentile, that is its place among hospitals of the same type in the same state that file a cost report, counted on that one figure. It is not a grade, it is not a judgment about the hospital, and this site attaches no word to it. Hospitals are counted; they are not ranked.

Operating expenses is the denominator because it is the measure a large teaching hospital and a twenty-five-bed rural hospital report on the same basis. No other figure on this site is derived, and no figure is combined with a figure from a different filing or a different year.

Figures are not ordered for you. Tables can be sorted by any column in either direction, and nothing on this site presents hospitals in a fixed order of its own.

Corrections

If a figure here does not match the file it cites, write to hello@velarionrecords.com with the 340B identifier. See Corrections.

Velarion Records takes no position on the 340B Drug Pricing Program, its rules, or anyone taking part in it.