Colorado's hospital systems, ranked by their own price files

When people shop for hospital care, the first question is usually which hospital. The quieter question is which system — the corporate parent whose name sits above the door at a dozen locations and whose hospitals' filed rates, taken together, show how prices across that network compare. Does it actually matter which system you walk into?

By the systems' own filings, yes. Federal law requires every hospital to publish the negotiated rates it has agreed with insurers in a machine-readable file. When you collect those files for the hospitals each Colorado system operates and line them up against the statewide median for the same procedures, the systems separate cleanly. Here is the ranking, drawn entirely from numbers the systems published themselves.

The ranking

For every procedure a system reports, we divide that system's median rate by the statewide median for the same procedure, then take the middle value across all of those comparisons. A system that lands right on the Colorado median scores even; above it means pricier than typical, below it means cheaper. Ranked from highest to lowest:

• HCA HealthONE — 1.84× the Colorado median. The for-profit system that operates Rose, Swedish, Presbyterian/St. Luke's and several other Denver-area hospitals comes in well above the statewide typical rate, across 257 hospital-procedure combinations.
• UCHealth — 1.05× the Colorado median. The University of Colorado's nonprofit system, the largest reporter in the data, lands almost exactly at the statewide median, across 584 hospital-procedure combinations.
• CommonSpirit — 0.87× the Colorado median. The Catholic nonprofit system behind the St. Anthony, St. Francis and St. Mary-Corwin hospitals files rates a touch below the statewide median, across 528 hospital-procedure combinations.
• Independent and other hospitals — 0.87× the Colorado median. Everyone outside those three named systems, taken together, also sits just below the statewide median, across 416 hospital-procedure combinations.

CommonSpirit and the independent-and-other bucket land on the same rounded multiple — a near-tie after rounding, not an exact equality. The statewide median each system is measured against is itself a median of medians: for every one of the 50 procedures we track in Colorado, the middle of all reporting hospitals' rates. So the ranking is not one system against another directly — it is each system against the typical Colorado hospital, procedure by procedure.

Who's missing — and why we won't guess

One large system is absent from the ranking on purpose: Banner Health. Across the procedures we track, Banner's Colorado hospitals report rates in only 19 of the hospital-procedure combinations our data covers — far below the 100-combination floor we require before we will publish a system-level number. We compute a figure internally; we do not publish it, and you should be skeptical of anyone who does from this data.

Suppressing it is the honest move, not a dodge. A ranking built on a handful of lines is a ranking that swings wildly on a single unusual contract — one expensive outlier or one cheap default rate can drag a small system's median anywhere it likes. A number computed from hundreds of comparisons is robust to that; a number computed from nineteen is mostly noise wearing a decimal point. The floor exists so that every figure in the ranking above is one we would stand behind, and the price of that discipline is leaving a thinly reported system off the board entirely.

What a 1.84× multiple does and doesn't mean

These are medians of published negotiated rates, not your bill. A multiple above the state median tells you a system's contracted prices tend to run high across the procedures it reports — it does not tell you what you personally will pay, which depends on your insurer, your plan's deductible, and the clinical specifics of your care. A system can sit high on this ranking and still be the cheaper choice for one particular procedure under one particular plan.

Two systems are also never reporting exactly the same mix of work. A system weighted toward complex surgical and inpatient lines will show different medians than one weighted toward routine outpatient and imaging, even if each is a fair price for what it does. The ranking measures each system against the state median for the same procedures, which controls for a lot of that, but it cannot fully erase differences in case mix and service line. Read the multiple as a strong directional signal about a system's contracting, not as a verdict on value.

Tax status alone does not explain the order: the highest-ranked system is for-profit, but two nonprofits land on opposite sides of the statewide median.

How we computed this

For each procedure a system's hospitals report, we take each hospital's median negotiated rate and divide it by the statewide median for that same procedure, giving a per-hospital, per-procedure ratio. The system's published figure is the median of all those ratios (the middle ratio, not the average). We require at least 100 such comparisons before a system is ranked — the floor that excludes Banner. Government payers — Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, VA — are left out of these medians as statutory fee-schedule floors; a small number of Medicare-style program lines filed under commercial-looking insurer labels can still survive into the commercial view, a caveat we name rather than bury. Full definitions are on the methodology page.

What you can do

A system-level ranking is a starting point, not an answer for your specific care. The useful next step is to drop to the hospital and the procedure that actually concern you. Browse every Colorado hospital we track to see a single hospital's rates rather than its system's average — or jump straight to one of the named hospitals — HCA HealthONE Rose Medical Center — for procedure-level detail. On any procedure page you can pick your insurance carrier to re-rank hospitals by what your plan's published rate actually is — the same files this ranking is built from, sliced to your situation. Browse every procedure we track to start from the care you actually need.