The U.S. health economy is unsustainable, and reputation-driven rankings and “vanity lists” offer little value to leaders navigating rising costs, shifting demographics and regulatory pressures. Trilliant Health’s recent price transparency report underscored this reality by revealing that there is no observable correlation between cost and quality across 10 hospitals consistently featured on “best hospital” lists. This disconnect between perception and reality highlights the limitations of reputation-driven benchmarks and reinforces the need for data-driven comparisons that reflect actual market dynamics.
SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals is the health economy’s only data-driven hospital benchmarking analysis, available at no cost on our website. The index uses machine learning models to identify the 50 most similar peer hospitals for each of the more than 2,200 U.S. hospitals in the analysis and compares their performance based on Quality, Financial, Competitive and Price indexes. With the 2025 data, health economy stakeholders can identify which hospitals are truly comparable and confront the reality that even among peers, pricing variation remains both drastic and unexplained.
What’s New: 2025 Data Refresh
The updated SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals ensures that hospital leaders are benchmarking performance with the most current data available:
- Refreshed Quality, Financial and Competitive Measures. Benchmark against the most recent CMS and hospital-reported data to ensure peer comparisons reflect current operating conditions, from readmissions and occupancy to shifts in market share.
- Refreshed Select Commercial Rates. Review negotiated rate data for a select procedure at each hospital from the August 2025 UnitedHealthcare (UHC) machine-readable files to gain insight into commercial reimbursement and confirm that hospital similarity does not always translate to procedure cost.
Why It Matters
In 2023, Trilliant Health’s first edition of SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals started a nationwide conversation about the pitfalls of vanity metrics and not knowing your true peers. In 2025, data-driven benchmarking is even more important, as the U.S. health economy continues to grow at an unsustainable pace, with rising costs, shifting demographics and regulatory burdens creating mounting pressure on providers. To compete effectively and provide value for money, every hospital and health system must understand how its prices compare to its true peers.
With refreshed data for 2025, SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals enables leaders to benchmark against true peers with current inputs, not against outdated measures. Data-driven peer comparisons help executives:
- Identify where your hospital’s financial or quality performance lags hospitals with similar operating characteristics and competitive dynamics.
- Understand the wide range of reimbursement from the same payer for the same service among otherwise comparable facilities, highlighting strategic opportunities and risks for payer contract negotiations.
Timely, objective benchmarks are essential for decision-making in today’s volatile health economy. The 2025 SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals enables leaders to use actual, not aspirational, benchmarks to address the realities of the current health economy.
Get Started Today
Find your hospital’s true peers with the 2025 SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals.
Interested in additional health plan price transparency data? Schedule a demo to see how you can access rate data for the payers, organizations, providers and procedures that matter most to your strategy.
