Containing Hospital Costs: Using Audited Financial Statements to Assess Hospital Financial Positions

This project will determine how best to describe and evaluate the financial health of hospital-based organizations for policymaking purposes. The project will identify the appropriate financial metrics, explore policymakers’ need for financial information, and design a policy-relevant sampling method. The resulting analytic approach will then be applied to 50 health systems to evaluate their financial status using their audited financial information from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s (MSRB) EMMA database, a novel data source in health policy research. The data would be presented at both the individual system level and in policy-relevant groupings. The methodology would be shared publicly so that the analysis would be replicable and scalable.