Augusta Georgia Hospital's Worksheet S-10 Comparison

In an effort to learn Python and improve on my Excel VBA skills, I am working with Medicare cost report data to see what information I can glean and share on this blog. I spend a lot of my work-life on Worksheet S-10, so I decided to take a look at this data for the hospital from my hometown. In my professional career, I’ve never worked with any Georgia hospital, so this is all new data to me.

CMS publishes cost report data regularly and it is available on their website for public use. The files are large, so you can’t just open them up in Excel. This is where learning Python came into play. I was able to download multiple years of data and use Python to pull out just the S-10 data. I then created an Excel VBA macro which includes a Worksheet S-10 template that dynamically pulls in the data for the hospitals and date ranges chosen. It was a fun project and it really helps me see trends at hospitals that I am not familiar with.

Augusta-Area Hospitals Worksheet S-10

Musing Revelation

Based on the S-10 data I was able to extract from the last as-filed Medicare cost reports for the selected Augusta, Georgia hospitals, it comes as no surprise that AU Medical Center (aka Medical College of Georgia) has the most uncompensated care cost. I am surprised that University Hospital and Doctors Hospital uncompensated care costs are about the same. I really figured University would have been much higher, but Doctors does have a burn unit and that equates to really high charges. You can see that charge-wise Doctor’s hospital has a much higher amount - $298M vs $69M. However, their cost-to-charge (CCR) ratio is really low comparatively, so their uncompensated care costs adjusted way down. In another blog post, I noticed that Burke Medical Center’s uncompensated care cost is usually about $2M. My guess is, they will get this trued up when the S-10 audit rolls around.