The Inpatient Cost Diagnostic examines a hospital's clinical performance versus a custom peer group comprised of local market hospitals and/or "best practice" hospitals.

The Inpatient Cost Diagnostic™ rigorously examines a hospital's clinical performance versus a custom peer group comprised of local market hospitals and/or "best practice" hospitals.

Hospitals analyzed in the Inpatient Cost Diagnostic (ICD) are adjusted for severity, case mix and wage differences. The ICD benchmarks performance at the overall hospital, product line, department and DRG levels to provide valuable information on:

		Which product lines are high cost?
		Where should critical pathways be implemented?
		What are realistic cost reduction targets?

The Inpatient Cost Diagnostic is designed to distill voluminous, patient-level data down to executive-level information. This is facilitated by including insightful "How to Read This Chart" and "Example" text that is tailored to each chart.

The ICD utilizes a national discharge database containing detailed information on hospital Medicare discharges. This database is augmented by state all-payer discharge databases where available. Department-level ratios of costs to charges (RCCs) are derived from hospital-specific financial statements to approximate costs.