Data sources & export
Everything here is built on public data, and we keep it traceable to the source.
Where the prices come from
- Hospital machine-readable files (MRFs) — the standard-charge files each hospital publishes under 45 CFR §180. These are the source of every price on the site; each hospital page links to the exact file and ingestion date.
- CMS provider directories — the federal hospital list and Provider of Services file, used to identify hospitals and add context like bed counts.
- U.S. Census CBSA crosswalk — to group hospitals by metro area.
How we process it
We parse each MRF, match line items to procedure codes, score data quality, and compute a representative facility price per procedure. The full pipeline is described in our methodology.
Open data export
We archive periodic snapshots of the normalized price dataset as Parquet — a compact, analysis-ready columnar format — so the data can be studied in bulk rather than scraped page by page. If you're a researcher, journalist, or developer who wants the dataset, email contact@openhospitalcost.com and tell us what you're working on.
Prefer the originals? Each hospital's raw MRF is linked from its page, and the federal source files are publicly available from CMS.
Reuse & attribution
The underlying hospital and CMS files are public records. If you use figures from OpenHospitalCost, please cite the site and, where possible, the individual hospital's source file so readers can verify the numbers themselves.