Hospital Financial Data Interactive Series: Hospital Utilization

From 2014–2021, comparable hospitals in California saw a 16.1 percent decrease in statewide numbers of inpatient surgeries and a 1.8 percent increase in statewide numbers of outpatient surgeries.

Hospital Utilization Introduction

The Hospital Financial Data Interactive Series presents data visualizations built from the financial reports that all California hospitals are required to submit annually to HCAI. The visualizations were created to help assess hospital financial status and service volume and to advance healthcare and cost transparency.

This is the second topic of the interactive series. This section focuses on information from the financial data related to facility utilization and labor productivity and aims to help depict hospital service volume. Additional topics in this visualization series covering hospital financials, can be found on the Hospital Financial Data Interactive Series landing page.

Users can switch between seven different utilization topics—Annual Licensed Beds, Annual Discharges, Annual Patient Days, Annual Outpatient Visits, Annual Productive Full-Time Equivalents, Annual Count of Inpatient and Outpatient Surgeries, and Annual Average Length of Stay—using the navigation buttons at the top of the visualization. By default, the visualizations display aggregate amounts for all California hospitals. The drop-down menus allow users to select the data for specific counties, cities or facilities of interest, or by teaching/rural facility designation or hospital control (ownership) type.

The visualizations in this series include fully audited data on comparable hospitals for the calendar years 2014–2021. For more information, see the section labeled “How HCAI Created this Product”. Kaiser, state, and psychiatric health facilities are not included, as they submit data differently than other hospitals. Per SB 343, Kaiser Permanente began submitting annual financial files for the 2022 fiscal year end by individual facility, similar to other hospital systems. Data for the year 2022 and subsequent years will reflect this change.

Note: Refresh the page to reset all views to their default values.

How HCAI Created This Product

  • The data within the HCAI Hospital Annual Financial Data series was pulled from the facility-level information that all individual hospitals and hospital systems are required to report annually to HCAI. The information collected consists of data on services capacity, inpatient/outpatient utilization, patients, revenues and expenses by type and payer, balance sheets and income statements, all available in a complete dataset. The Selected Data Tables, condensed tables containing a wide range of the most commonly-used data items, were used to create the visualizations in the series. For more information about the data tables used, see the Hospital Annual Selected File – Documentation.
  • Payer categories used in the Hospital Annual Financial Data series are based on the standard regulatory definitions used in reporting, sourced from the HCAI Accounting and Reporting Manual for California Hospitals. These definitions can also be found in the Glossary section.
  • Definitions for relevant terminology and the calculations used can be found in the Glossary section.

For more information on the HCAI financial data products, please visit the following links:

Glossary

Glossary TermsDefinition
Type of CareConsists of Acute, Psychiatric, Chemical Dependency, Rehabilitation, Long-Term and Residential Care.
Total Productive Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs)Calculated by taking the amount of productive hours per different job classification and dividing by 2080 hours. The results are rounded to the nearest whole number.
Payer Terms
Medicare – TraditionalIncludes patients covered under the Social Security Amendments of 1965 enrolled in a fee-for-service (FFS) plan.
Medicare – ManagedIncludes patients covered under the Social Security Amendments of 1965 enrolled in a managed care plan funded by Medicare.
Medi-Cal – TraditionalIncludes patients qualified as needy under state laws and covered by a fee-for-service (FFS) plan.
Medi-Cal – ManagedIncludes patients qualified as needy by state laws and covered by a managed care plan funded by Medi-Cal.
County Indigent – CombinedIncludes both County Indigent – Traditional and County Indigent – Managed.
County Indigent – TraditionalIncludes patients covered under Welfare and Institution (W&I) Code Section 17000, including those programs funded in whole or in part by County Medical Services Program (CMSP), California Health Care for Indigents Program (CHIP) and/or Realignment Funds.
County Indigent – ManagedIncludes patients covered under Welfare and Institution (W&I) Code Section 17000 who are enrolled in a managed care plan funded by a county.
Third Party – TraditionalIncludes all other forms of health coverage excluding managed care plans. This term maps to commercial in most other HCAI data sources.
Third Party – ManagedIncludes patients covered by managed care plans other than those funded by Medicare, Medi-Cal or a county. This term maps to commercial in most other HCAI data sources.
Other IndigentIncludes indigent patients provided with charity care by the hospital and UC teaching hospital patients that are provided care with Support for Clinical Teaching funds.
All OtherIncludes all other financial classes not covered above.

See the Hospital Annual Selected File – Documentation for a full glossary of relevant terminology.

Additional Information

Topic: Cost Transparency 
Source Link: Hospital Financials
Citation: Hospital Annual Financial Data — Selected Data & Pivot Tables, 2014–2021
Temporal Coverage: 2014–2021
Spatial/Geographic Coverage: Statewide
Frequency: Annually