ABOUT THE DATA
Data & Methodology
CAHStory brings together publicly reported information about Critical Access Hospitals. The figures describe historical reporting periods, not current financial performance or an assessment of clinical quality.
Reporting periods
Financial and operating trends are drawn primarily from CMS Medicare hospital cost reports, with available historical years from FY2020 through 2024 CMS file. Individual hospitals may have different fiscal year-end dates. CMS cost-report figures may be amended, incomplete, or unavailable for some hospitals.
Bundled 2024 CMS file coverage: 1,382 hospital profiles, 1,364 matched financial records, 1,375 county demographic matches, and 1,343 usable operating-margin observations. These are distinct denominators.
Sources
- CMS Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS): reported financial and operating data.
- CMS hospital and service directories: hospital identification and service information.
- CMS quality datasets and publicly available Census indicators: contextual information where provided.
- Public news and hospital information: editorial discovery, not a substitute for source documents.
Peer benchmarks
Comparisons use available reporting hospitals that match the selected geography and bed-size filters. Peer medians and percentile positions exclude missing or nonnumeric observations. Benchmarks require at least five reporting peers. A peer comparison is descriptive and does not control for case mix, accounting differences, payer contracts, or local conditions.
Calculated measures
Margins, growth, shares, ratios, and estimated liquidity measures may be calculated from reported fields. In particular, estimated cash days are a rough proxy and are not audited days cash on hand. Growth rates reflect the stated historical periods, not current-year performance.
Interpretation
Changes in reported measures may reflect accounting classifications, reporting revisions, service mix, and unusual events. Missing data are not assumed to be zero. Rankings indicate relative reported values, not hospital quality or overall performance.
Updates
This release is a static Cloudflare Pages website. Its bundled data do not refresh automatically. Refer to the reporting year shown with each figure; a deployment date is not the date of the underlying hospital data.
National verification release
Website identity checks require a successful HTML fetch with the full hospital name, city and CMS telephone or street address. Verification is automated and evidence is preserved per record. A reachable hospital-linked source page is separate from verifying document contents, hospital applicability or regulatory compliance.
CMS roster sources can disagree because their publication dates differ. Hospital General Information and the Q3 2026 Provider of Services file are retained independently. No closure or certification change is inferred solely from absence in one source.
The legacy patient service margin is net income from service to patients divided by net patient revenue. This proxy differs from audited total operating margin. The CMS file year can differ from fiscal year end. Financial report IDs and exact reporting dates appear on hospital profiles.
Future collection scripts are provided; recurring collection is not active merely because these static files are uploaded. View current coverage and unresolved hospitals.