NORTHWEST CTR FOR BEHAVIORAL HEALTH

Hospital cost reports are an enormously complicated dataset. There are whole organizations and an offical CMS vendor dedicated to helping researchers work with the data.
It's important to understand that hospital financials in cost reports are not organized in the same as other sources such as annual financial reports to bond holders.

The biggest difference is the concept of operating revenue and profit. Net Service to patients (NS2P), which is the sum of net patient revenue minus operating expenses, is considered the equivalent of operating profit according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC). See the last paragraph of "Primary Data Sources" on page 55 of Annual Analysis of Disproportionate Share Hospital Allotments to States (PDF).

That would make Net Patient Revenue = operating revenue.

All this makes things challenging when comparing what's reported in cost reports to other sources. It becomes clearer when you consider that, beyond the purpose of reimbursement, cost reports are a tool for policymakers trying to understand the financial situation of a hospital doing the tasks specific to hospitals.

In other words, while a facility with a division that formulates drugs might include earnings from that as operating revenue in their corporate annual result, this is not central to the operations of a hospital caring for patients and so it is counted as "other income." (See below the financials section for more on "other income")

The healthcare consulting firm HMP, in a former partnership with Modern Healthcare, did develop a formula for estimating operating revenue closer to what one might find in other sources. We no longer use this for the following reasons:

• The measure was not widely used beyond HMP and Modern Healthcare. Many hospitals had their own internal estimates of operating revenue and profit.
• Because of this, there was confusion when reporting operating results for individual hospitals. There was often pushback when a facility's internal numbers did not match what Modern Healthcare was reporting.
• The formula includes revenue from portions of the "other income" section, which may also include non-operating revenue. HMP themselves point out in a caveat on their site that they cannot exclude all non-operating revenue from their measure.

HMP's operating measure has proven problematic in the past for our reporting and the partnership with them ended years ago. It's best to not use a measure that we alone cannot defend.