What does a procedure cost at hospitals near this ZIP? Cash price, gross charge and every insurer’s negotiated rate for a CPT, HCPCS or MS-DRG code at Colorado hospitals, normalized by Distill from the hospitals’ federally required price files
hospital_pricesWhat does a procedure cost at hospitals near this ZIP? Cash price, gross charge and every insurer’s negotiated rate for a CPT, HCPCS or MS-DRG code at Colorado hospitals, normalized by Distill from the hospitals’ federally required price files. From the machine-readable standard-charge files hospitals must publish (45 CFR 180), parsed and normalized: for each hospital within the radius that posts the code, nearest first, the gross charge, the discounted cash price, the de-identified minimum and maximum, and every payer and plan’s negotiated dollar amount or percentage (with the v3.0 median, 10th and 90th percentile allowed amounts), payers canonicalized to a stable payer_id. Filters: payer, plan type, plan name text, setting, billing class. A summary gives nearest-rank statistics over the hospitals returned. Served states: Colorado. An area with no hospital posting the code answers 404 and is not charged. Refreshed monthly (live freshness: /status). 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". Answers in a summary view of about 3,000 tokens; view: "full" for every row. 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. 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.
Tool call template
Replace each placeholder with a value matching the input schema. Only required parameters are included; add optional parameters as needed.
{
"id": 1,
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"arguments": {
"code": "<code>"
},
"name": "hospital_prices"
}
}Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| lat | No | Latitude of the point (with lon). | |
| lon | No | Longitude of the point (with lat). | |
| zip | No | A 5-digit ZIP code (its Census ZCTA point). Give a zip, or lat and lon. | |
| 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". | |
| view | No | summary (the default): the answer a model needs, budgeted; full: every row (a free answer stays capped). | |
| limit | No | How many hospitals to return, nearest first (default 10, at most 50). | |
| 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. | |
| plan_type | No | Optional: the canonical plan type. | |
| radius_miles | No | Search radius in miles (default 25, at most 100). | |
| billing_class | No | Optional: facility or professional (items posted for both always match). |