Hospital Intelligence Brief
New York’s public discharge data shows where patients are treated, hospital by hospital and service by service. It does not show what the care paid or cost, which limits what it can prove.
What can public discharge data tell you about your hospital’s market, and where does it stop?
Every hospital wants to know how it is doing against its neighbors: who is gaining patients, in which services, and where residents are going instead. Public discharge data is one of the few sources that answers those questions for everyone in a market at once.
This matters because market decisions (investing in a service, recruiting a specialty, responding to a competitor) depend on knowing demand and share. But discharge data answers “where did patients go?” not “was it worth it?” Mixing those up is the most common mistake.
Verified fact The Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) is New York State’s data system for patient-level information on hospital discharges, ambulatory surgery and emergency department visits. De-identified public-use files are published by the state. Where charges appear in such data, they are not the same as what was paid or what care cost.
Within those limits, discharge data can support several useful comparisons:
The synthetic market in this article is illustrative and is not New York data. It is built to behave like the public discharge data described above, so you can practice reading it safely.
In the synthetic market, our hospital’s discharges moved from 6,043 to 5,888 (−2.6%) while the market moved from 21,800 to 22,300 (+2.3%). Our share moved from 27.7% to 26.4%. Illustrative
| Hospital | Discharges FY25 | Discharges FY26 | Share FY25 | Share FY26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demo Community Hospital (us) | 6,043 | 5,888 | 27.7% | 26.4% |
| St. Mary’s Regional | 5,113 | 5,815 | 23.5% | 26.1% |
| Riverside Health | 4,275 | 4,095 | 19.6% | 18.4% |
| County General | 3,630 | 3,702 | 16.7% | 16.6% |
| Valley Medical | 2,739 | 2,800 | 12.6% | 12.6% |
Calculated The market grew modestly and we shrank, so our share slipped, while St. Mary’s Regional gained 2.6 pts of share. Within our own discharges, Obstetrics fell 13.5%, Orthopedics 3.2% and Oncology 6.3%, while General Surgery rose 5.4%.
Hypothesis Share loss in specific services could reflect a competitor’s new physicians or program, a change in access, or a referral shift. Discharge data can show that it happened and where. It cannot show why, or whether the lost cases were ones we would have wanted.
4. Explore the interactive experience
Hospital Market Explorer: a market dashboard comparing a five-hospital market by service category, an outmigration capture scenario, evidence-linked answers from APIS, and a sample brief, all on synthetic data.
The experience below uses a synthetic five-hospital market built to look like public discharge data. It is not New York data, or data for any real market, and every figure is illustrative. The counts are discharges, not dollars.
Discharge data is a starting point for questions. These options turn what it shows into next steps.
Two Pillars can help hospital leadership investigate market, financial, operational, and strategic questions using relevant organizational data, public information, and a structured assessment process. A good first step is a market intelligence review that turns public discharge data into a short list of questions worth answering with your own data.
