Trilliant Health Launches 2025 SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals, Empowering Data-Driven Benchmarking for U.S. Healthcare Facilities
Trilliant Health, a leading authority in healthcare analytics and market intelligence, today announced the release of the 2025 edition of its SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals. This unique benchmarking tool stands out as the only data-driven resource in the health economy specifically designed to provide hospital leaders with accurate, peer-based performance comparisons. By leveraging comprehensive quality, financial, competitive, and pricing data, the SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals enables healthcare executives to make informed strategic and operational decisions grounded in objective, real-world metrics.
Unlike traditional hospital rankings or reputation-based “vanity lists,” which often reflect perception more than performance, the SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals employs advanced machine learning algorithms to identify the 50 most similar hospitals for over 2,200 U.S. hospitals. These peer groupings allow healthcare leaders to compare their facilities against hospitals with genuinely comparable operational, competitive, and financial profiles, ensuring more meaningful insights than generic national rankings. Importantly, the index does not include hospitals that fail to report critical CMS-required measures. More than 2,000 hospitals were excluded from this year’s rankings because they did not submit at least one of the mandatory mortality, readmission, or Hospital Acquired Condition (HAC) measures.
Comprehensive Benchmarking Across Key Performance Dimensions
The 2025 SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals provides hospital leaders with the ability to benchmark performance across multiple critical dimensions, including readmissions, occupancy, market share, and reimbursement rates. By analyzing these factors, hospital executives can identify operational strengths and areas requiring improvement relative to their true peers. This insight is particularly valuable in a healthcare landscape where outcomes and efficiency increasingly drive reimbursement and competitive positioning.
The SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals incorporates the most current data available, enabling healthcare leaders to make decisions grounded in the latest industry information. This includes:
- Updated Quality, Financial, and Competitive Measures: The index integrates the most recent CMS and hospital-reported metrics, allowing hospital leaders to benchmark their performance accurately against facilities with similar operational characteristics. The measures include hospital readmissions, patient occupancy rates, and shifts in market share, reflecting real-time changes in the healthcare environment. By focusing on current performance data, the tool ensures that comparisons are relevant and actionable.
- Refreshed Commercial Rates: Trilliant Health provides insights into negotiated rates for select procedures at each hospital, sourced from machine-readable files released by a large national payer. This feature highlights the wide variation in commercial rates across hospitals and offers executives a clear perspective on pricing strategies and competitiveness within their market. Understanding these variations is increasingly important as hospitals navigate the complexities of value-based care and commercial payer negotiations.
Why True Peer Comparisons Matter
“For hospitals often labeled as the ‘best,’ benchmarking doesn’t mean much because their closest peers are still very different,” said Hal Andrews, President and CEO of Trilliant Health. “What truly matters is delivering value for money. For the rest of the industry, that starts with comparing performance to true peers with similar competitive dynamics.”
This perspective underlines a critical challenge in the healthcare industry: generic national rankings often fail to provide actionable insights. Hospitals that appear at the top of traditional lists may not face the same market pressures or operational constraints as others, making direct comparisons misleading. The SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals addresses this gap by applying rigorous data science techniques to identify comparable hospitals, ensuring that benchmarking reflects realistic operational contexts rather than subjective reputation scores.
Driving Strategic Decision-Making in Health Systems
Hospital executives, health system leaders, and policymakers can use the SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals to guide strategic initiatives, operational improvements, and market positioning efforts. By understanding how their facilities perform relative to similar hospitals, executives can make informed decisions in areas such as:
- Quality Improvement: Compare readmission rates, mortality metrics, and HAC performance with true peers to identify areas for clinical intervention and resource allocation.
- Financial Planning: Analyze reimbursement trends, commercial rate variability, and occupancy rates to develop more precise budget forecasts and cost containment strategies.
- Competitive Analysis: Assess market share shifts and performance dynamics to optimize service offerings, growth strategies, and market positioning.
- Policy Development: Inform health system and government policy decisions with objective, peer-based insights on hospital performance, quality, and cost-effectiveness.
Trilliant Health’s tool emphasizes that meaningful benchmarking requires a multidimensional approach. It is not enough to focus solely on quality or reputation; hospitals must also consider financial performance, payer negotiations, and competitive dynamics to fully understand their standing in the healthcare landscape.
Machine Learning and Data Science at the Core
The SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals is powered by sophisticated machine learning models that analyze vast datasets to identify the 50 most similar hospitals for each institution. This peer identification process considers a wide range of factors, including patient demographics, service mix, market characteristics, operational metrics, and payer profiles. By leveraging these advanced analytics techniques, Trilliant Health provides hospital leaders with peer comparisons that are both statistically rigorous and operationally relevant.
In addition, the tool’s exclusion criteria ensure that only hospitals with complete reporting on CMS-required metrics are included in the comparisons. This focus on high-quality, reliable data ensures that benchmarking insights are accurate and trustworthy, reinforcing the credibility of the tool among healthcare executives.
Free Access for Healthcare Leaders
The 2025 edition of the SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals is now available at no cost through Trilliant Health’s website. By offering free access, Trilliant Health is enabling hospital leaders, health system executives, and policymakers to leverage cutting-edge analytics without financial barriers. This democratization of data-driven insights supports the broader goal of improving hospital performance, patient outcomes, and overall value in the U.S. healthcare system.
Executives can explore detailed comparisons, visualize peer performance across multiple dimensions, and generate actionable insights to support operational and strategic planning. The tool’s user-friendly interface allows hospital leaders to access complex datasets in an intuitive manner, translating sophisticated analytics into practical applications.
A Step Forward for Data-Driven Healthcare
As healthcare continues to evolve toward value-based care models, tools like the SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals are increasingly essential. Accurate, peer-based benchmarking enables hospitals to make informed decisions, improve patient outcomes, manage costs, and remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment. Trilliant Health’s commitment to leveraging the latest data science, quality reporting, and commercial rate transparency reflects a broader industry trend toward evidence-based management and operational excellence.
In conclusion, the 2025 SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals offers a transformative approach to hospital benchmarking, replacing outdated rankings with a robust, data-driven model that reflects true peer performance. Hospital leaders now have access to actionable insights that encompass quality, financial, competitive, and commercial pricing data, empowering them to optimize operations, enhance patient care, and navigate the increasingly complex healthcare marketplace.
For more information and to access the 2025 SimilarityIndex® | Hospitals, hospital leaders, health system executives, and policymakers can visit the Trilliant Health website, where the tool is available for free and ready to deliver timely, peer-based benchmarking insights.
