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CMS HCRIS HospitalsCMS HCRIS Hospital Cost Reports (form CMS-2552-10)
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services · Tier-2 · profile-enrichment (renders on matched profiles)
Annual financial + operational filings every Medicare-certified hospital submits to CMS under the Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS). Form CMS-2552-10 carries ~600 line items per facility; the Fonteum projection persists 14 headline financial + operational fields (net patient revenue, operating + total margin, bad debt, charity care, beds, occupancy, cost-to-charge ratio, days cash on hand) keyed on CCN.
How this source shows up on Fonteum.
Tier-2 profile enrichment for Medicare-certified hospitals. Headline fields can render with available source, vintage, and fiscal-year metadata; coverage varies by record.
What this source does NOT mean
Cost reports are self-reported financial filings under federal regulatory obligation. They are not audited statements (though CMS contractors review against benchmarks), not real-time, and not comparable across non-Medicare-certified facilities. A negative operating margin is a financial signal, not a quality measure or a recommendation against the facility.
Research and data questions this source supports.
- Pull hospital total revenue, net patient revenue, and operating margin from CMS cost reports — the same data commercial vendors (Definitive Healthcare, Strata Decision) license at $30K–$185K/yr, now free.
- Build a hospital financial health dashboard that identifies facilities at risk of closure based on operating margin and charity-care load.
- Compare hospital cost-per-discharge across states and facility types to support research on healthcare spending variation.
- Support M&A diligence on hospital targets with CMS-reported balance sheet and income statement data.
- Power a rural hospital sustainability study combining HCRIS financial data with CMS Care Compare quality scores.
Dataset size: ~6,000 hospital cost report filings per year
Per-field display contract.
Fields listed below show their configured `display_allowed` flag from the §94 provenance schema. Fields marked write-locked are captured for audit and are not rendered on profile pages.
Renders on profile
12 fieldsResearch-only — never on profiles
1 fieldWhat we can’t infer from this source.
- Annual, not real-time. The latest fiscal year published lags the calendar year by 9–14 months.
- Self-reported by the facility under federal regulatory obligation; CMS reviews against benchmarks but reports are not independently audited.
- Limited to Medicare-certified hospitals filing form 2552-10. Critical-access hospitals, SNF cost reports (2540-10), and home-health cost reports are filed under different forms and queue separately.
- Cross-facility comparability requires careful attention to fiscal-year boundaries (some hospitals use Jan-Dec, others July-June, etc.); the Fonteum projection preserves both fiscal_year_begin + fiscal_year_end.
- Cost-report fields are financial; they do not measure clinical quality. Margin and occupancy are operating-context signals only.
Authority, license, publisher cadence.
Authority
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Tier
Tier-2 · profile-enrichment (renders on matched profiles)
Publisher / configured cadence
Declared or configured cadence: Annual CMS publisher cadence. Not evidence of the latest loaded source date.
License
U.S. government public-domain works (17 U.S.C. § 105). Federal public record. Attribution required: 'Source: CMS HCRIS Hospital Cost Report · Fiscal Year {YYYY}'. License ↗
Official URL
Attribution requirement
Source: CMS HCRIS Hospital Cost Report · Fiscal Year {YYYY}
What the source allows.
U.S. government public-domain works (17 U.S.C. § 105). CMS publishes HCRIS as an annual ZIP archive at data.cms.gov with explicit redistribution rights. Hash and manifest coverage must be read from the specific artifact; no provenance fact currently links deterministically to a signature.
What a single field looks like in the graph.
This worked example shows the provenance shape used when a surfaced field has populated source, last-checked, display-rule, and confidence metadata. Individual fields may omit unavailable values.
Field
Per-facility operating margin (profile)
Sample value
Operating margin: 2.4% · FY2024 (Oct 2023 – Sep 2024) · CCN 010001
Provenance line
Source: CMS HCRIS Hospital Cost Report · Fiscal Year 2024 · Methodology hcris-2552-10/v1 · Display rule: per-facility headline fields render on hospital profile pages with the fiscal-year boundary inline
Official API, bulk download, and Fonteum endpoints.
Official API / download
Fonteum surface
Common questions about CMS HCRIS Hospitals.
- What is CMS HCRIS and what data does it contain?
- The Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS) is CMS's repository of annual cost reports filed by Medicare-participating facilities. Hospital cost reports (Form 2552-10) contain detailed financial data including total charges, net patient revenue, operating expenses, charity care, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, full-time equivalent staff, and bed counts. Reports are filed by fiscal year end and available approximately 6–12 months after the fiscal year closes.
- Where can I download the CMS HCRIS hospital cost report data?
- CMS makes the HCRIS dataset available at data.cms.gov as quarterly CSV extracts. The Form 2552-10 Hospital Cost Reports dataset includes alpha and numeric report sections. The canonical download is at data.cms.gov/provider-compliance/cost-report/hospital-2552-10. The data is U.S. government public-domain with no redistribution restriction beyond attribution.
- How does the HCRIS cost report differ from commercial hospital financial databases?
- HCRIS is the primary source underlying most commercial hospital financial analytics products. Vendors like Definitive Healthcare, Strata Decision Technology, and Trilliant Health layer enrichment, standardization, and visualization on top of HCRIS, but the underlying cost report data is the same federal filing. Fonteum makes the cleaned HCRIS data directly accessible, replacing the $30K–$185K licensing cost for the base dataset.
- What is the refresh cadence for HCRIS data?
- CMS publishes quarterly updates to the HCRIS database as new fiscal-year cost reports are processed. Because hospitals file on their own fiscal year (not calendar year), reports arrive at CMS throughout the year rather than in a single annual batch. Loaded dates must be read from the specific response; publisher cadence is not proof of a completed load.
- Can HCRIS data be used to compare hospitals in the same market?
- HCRIS cost reports enable market-level comparison on revenue, cost, and margin — with the important caveat that cost report formats and accounting conventions vary by hospital system. Fonteum applies standardized field extraction from the 2552-10 worksheet codes to normalize the data, but users should be aware that cost report figures reflect CMS program accounting (not GAAP) and that some line items may be completed inconsistently across facilities.
Where this source already shows up.
Related sources in the graph
- /sources → The generated source-catalog subset — documented datasets Fonteum cites.
- /data-provenance → The provider graph — pipeline diagram, source-family clusters, field-level provenance examples, display rules.
- /methodology → Documented sourcing, publisher cadence, observed freshness, and corrections policy.
- /editorial-policy → Independence, sourcing, conflicts, corrections, retractions.