Consultants and advisors
Reimbursement, cost report, and revenue-cycle consultants who need to find hospitals that fit their specialty, research a prospect before approaching it, and benchmark clients they already serve.
For reimbursement consultants
Hospital prospecting and benchmarking tools for reimbursement consultants
Iron Horse Analytics helps reimbursement and cost-report consultants screen hospitals, prepare prospect research, and build client benchmarks from public federal cost report data, linked to each provider’s identity.
- Built for
- Reimbursement and cost report consultants
- Runs on
- Public federal cost report data (HCRIS), linked to provider identity
- Derived metrics
- FY2010 – FY2025
Who it serves
Built for the people who advise hospitals.
Hospital finance and reimbursement leaders
Teams that want to see how their own filed figures sit against comparable hospitals, using the same public data an advisor would.
Two workflows
What a working week looks like.
Prospect research
Find hospitals that fit what you do, and know what you are looking at before you call.
- 01Define the cohort. Choose a facility type, state or county (or a distance around a hospital), fiscal year, and ownership, then add thresholds on any of the 24 metrics.
- 02Review the result table and sort by the metric that matters to your specialty.
- 03Open a hospital's profile to see how its figures moved across its filed years.
- 04Check what qualifies the figure: the fiscal year end, the report status, and whether the value was reported at all.
- 05Export the cohort as CSV for your own notes, and go into the introductory conversation with questions, not conclusions.
Client analysis
Put a client's cost report figures beside comparable hospitals.
- 01Find the client by name or CCN and open its profile.
- 02Build a comparison set with the same filters, or with a radius around the client.
- 03Read the metrics for the set across the years you need.
- 04Export the set and calculate medians and quartiles in your own tools. The portal does not score or rank peers for you.
- 05Check the metric definitions on the methodology page before you put a figure in front of a client.
A worked example, with real figures and its limits: building a hospital peer group for prospect research.
What you can do
In the portal.
- Filter by facility type (short-term acute, critical access, psychiatric, rehabilitation, long-term care, children's), state, county, fiscal year, and ownership.
- Set thresholds on any of 24 derived cost report metrics, such as net revenue, operating expenses, Medicare days, or DSH payments.
- Search near a hospital you choose, by distance.
- Open facility profiles with multi-year trends and year-over-year movement.
- Export the current result set as CSV: identity, fiscal period, report status, and all 24 metrics.
The portal screens on the cost report metrics. The other linked sources (NPPES, Medicare Part B, Open Payments, CMS Compare, Form 990) sit in the warehouse behind it and are available through an engagement.
What it does not do
Said plainly.
- Named decision-makers or contact details for anyone at a hospital.
- Claims-level data. The figures come from each hospital's annual cost report.
- Estimates of reimbursement opportunities, savings, or guaranteed outcomes.
- Automatic peer selection or scoring. You choose the filters; the portal returns the matching hospitals.
Coverage and limits
Read the data the way the filings are.
Cost reports are annual and filed after the fiscal year ends. These are the limits that matter when you cite a figure.
- Years
- Derived metrics cover FY2010 – FY2025. The most recent years are the least complete.
- Fiscal years differ
- A hospital's fiscal year ends in any month. A fiscal year here is the calendar year its period ends in, so one year mixes June, September, and December year ends.
- Filing and settlement
- A report starts as submitted and can later be settled, reopened, or amended. We keep the latest submission for each hospital and fiscal year end, and its status is shown.
- Missing values
- A cell missing from a filing is stored as zero for most metrics. A zero can mean not reported.
- Scope
- Hospital cost reports (Form CMS-2552-10). Not claims, and not clinical or quality outcomes.
Questions
What consultants ask first.
- How can consultants identify hospitals that match their specialty?
- Build a cohort with filters. Start with facility type, geography, fiscal year, and ownership, then add thresholds on the metrics your work turns on, such as Total DSH Payments, Uncompensated Care (S-10), Total IME Payments, Direct GME Payments, Medicare Bad Debts, or Medicare Inpatient Payment. A result is a screening signal that a hospital deserves a closer look, not a conclusion about it.
- How are peer comparisons supported?
- A peer group is the set of hospitals your filters (or a distance around a hospital) return. The filters live in the page address, so you can come back to the same cohort. Exporting it puts the whole group in one table, and you calculate medians and quartiles in your own tools. The portal does not choose peers or score them.
- How current and complete are the records?
- The derived metrics cover FY2010 – FY2025, one row per hospital and fiscal year end, from the latest processed cost report for that period. Recent years are less complete because hospitals file after their year ends and CMS processes reports afterwards. A figure can change when a report is settled, reopened, or amended, and a value missing from a filing is stored as zero for most metrics, so a zero can mean not reported. The methodology page explains each of these.
- What can subscribers export?
- The current result set as a CSV file: CCN, name, facility type and class, city, state, ZIP, county, CBSA, ownership code, parent organization, fiscal year and its start and end dates, report status, and all 24 metrics. A search by distance adds coordinates and distance. Each export has a size limit, so for a very large cohort narrow the filters by state or fiscal year, or ask us about an extract.
- Does the portal give contact details or tell me who to call?
- No. It does not supply named decision-makers or contact details. It tells you which hospitals fit your criteria and what their filed financial and operating figures look like, so you can decide whom to approach and what to ask.
- Can I see it working on my own hospitals before I subscribe?
- Yes. Ask for a walkthrough and we will run it on the hospitals or cohort you care about. Each hospital also has a public page with its latest net patient revenue, margin, and beds, which shows the kind of data behind the portal.
Next step
See it on hospitals you know.
Ask for a walkthrough and we will run it on your cohort, or look at how the data is built and what it can and cannot tell you.