The Compass

Aspirational Benchmarking Leads to Flawed Decision Making Throughout the Health Economy
For decades, stakeholders across the health economy have relied on ordinal rank lists like U.S. News & World Report to determine which hospitals are “best,” thereby creating unrealistic or irrelevant benchmarks for their respective organizations. To improve healthcare decision making, we are pleased to release 2023 Trilliant Health SimilarityIndex™ | Hospitals, the health economy’s only data-driven hospital benchmarking analysis.

Hospitals represent the single largest part (31%) of the $4.3T health economy. All health economy stakeholders from biopharma and medical device to retail and digital health are impacted by what does and does not happen in acute care hospitals. Instead of ranking hospitals largely based on subjective and self-reported criteria, the SimilarityEngine™ indexes facilities using machine learning models based exclusively on objective and relevant datapoints.

The publicly available SimilarityIndex™ | Hospitals identifies the 50 most similar peers for more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals and compares their performance based on Quality, Financial, Competitive and Price indexes.

The Foundation of an Evidence-Based Strategy is an Accurate Benchmark
Data-driven strategies to evaluate hospital performance and market quality have never been more important, especially in light of CMS’s Transparency in Coverage initiative that has revealed stark disparities in negotiated price for identical healthcare services. In the increasingly complex health economy, an exponentially better approach to decision making and accurate benchmarking is essential for all stakeholders to develop evidence-based strategies.

I hope the 2023 SimilarityIndex™ | Hospitals will fundamentally change how you identify true hospital peers and make informed strategic decisions accordingly, whether it be from the lens of quality, cost of care, patient population, market share, financial performance, or something else.