One billing code across up to 10 named hospitals, one normalized row each
hospital_compareFor each named hospital: whether it posts the code, and over its items for the code (only those without modifiers when it posts any, so a professional -26 or bilateral -50 line does not skew the row) nearest-rank statistics of its gross charges, discounted cash prices and negotiated dollar amounts across payers and plans, the range of negotiated percentages, the de-identified minimum and maximum, and the number of payers. The same filters as hospital.prices. Hospital ids come from hospital.prices (or pass a CMS certification number). Not charged when none of the hospitals is known. Price: $0.02 per call. Free tier: 3 free calls a day per IP, at most 3 rows per answer, taken by an unpaid call unless its _meta["distill/free-tier"] is "skip". Confidence: Mean over the returned rows (each rate; an item with no rate counts once) of normalize × quality × freshness. Normalize: the stored per-rate normalize confidence (payer canonicalization: rule 1, model 0.9, fallback 0.6; rate basis for rates with no dollar amount: rule 1, model 0.9, fallback 0.75; 1 for an item with no rate). Quality of the MRF: 1 valid against the v3.0 schema, 0.85 parsed with conformance errors, 0.7 parsed only after header repair. Freshness: 1 while the MRF’s last_updated_on is at most 365 days old, then halving every 180 days (0.5 with no date), times 1 within 14 days of our fetch, then halving every 30 days. Rows are each hospital’s items for the code as compared. Posted standard charges from hospital machine-readable files (45 CFR 180): posted rates, not a quote; not medical or financial advice. What you pay depends on your plan, your care and the hospital. See /terms.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| code | Yes | The billing code: CPT (5 characters, e.g. 99213), HCPCS Level II (a letter and 4 digits, e.g. J1885) or MS-DRG (3 digits, e.g. 470). | |
| plan | No | Optional: text the plan name (or payer name) contains as the hospital writes it, case-insensitive, e.g. "PPO" or "Medicare Advantage". | |
| payer | No | Optional: a canonical payer_id (e.g. aetna, cigna, unitedhealthcare, anthem, medicare, medicaid). hospital.payers lists the payers with prices for a code. | |
| setting | No | Optional: inpatient or outpatient (items posted for both always match). | |
| code_type | No | Optional: the code type. Inferred from the code’s shape when omitted. | |
| hospitals | Yes | One to ten hospital ids (e.g. co-060001) or CMS certification numbers, comma-separated. | |
| plan_type | No | Optional: the canonical plan type. | |
| billing_class | No | Optional: facility or professional (items posted for both always match). |