Our record beside the raw source — field by field.

Sampling methodology

Version

reconciliation-differ/v2

Join key

CMS Certification Number (CCN) — exact 6-digit match, no normalization

Universe

Hospitals present in both the CMS Care Compare Hospital General Information snapshot (2026-05-07) and the CMS Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS) database, joined by CCN. 5,208 of 5,426 Care Compare hospitals (96.0%) have an HCRIS cost report.

Sample

100 hospitals drawn from the 5,208-hospital join universe. Sorted by CCN ascending; every 52th record selected. Deterministic across deploys — same ordering every render.

Sources

Limitations

• Sample is deterministic, not random. Position in the universe is fixed by CCN sort order, so the distribution may over-represent CCN ranges (state prefixes) with dense HCRIS coverage.
• HCRIS fiscal years vary by hospital (not calendar year). The 'latest_fiscal_year_end' column reflects each hospital's own reporting period.
• A CCN present in HCRIS but absent from the Care Compare snapshot indicates the hospital has not published quality data via Care Compare in the current release — this is not a Fonteum data gap.
• No fuzzy or probabilistic matching is performed in the CCN join. Hospitals that appear in both files under slightly different identifiers are not joined.
• The Entity Links column is tiered: deterministic links (confidence 1.000) come from federal files that carry both CCN and NPI on the same row; probabilistic name/state candidates that have not passed operator review are labeled 'candidate · unreviewed' with their real confidence. Probabilistic links below confidence 0.95 are excluded from this page and the entity API.

Frequently asked questions

What is a reconciliation differ?

A reconciliation differ compares the same entity — here, a Medicare-certified hospital — across multiple federal data files to show what you gain, and what you miss, when you use each file alone. Fonteum's differ joins CMS Care Compare (quality and identity data) with HCRIS (financial data) by the 6-digit CMS Certification Number, then shows freshness, field coverage, and provenance side by side for each hospital.

How are hospitals sampled in this table?

100 hospitals drawn from the 5,208-hospital join universe. Sorted by CCN ascending; every 52th record selected. Deterministic across deploys — same ordering every render.

What is the CCN match rate between Care Compare and HCRIS?

5,208 of 5,426 Care Compare hospitals (96.0%) have a matching HCRIS cost report when joined by exact CCN. The remaining 218 hospitals have quality data in Care Compare but no current HCRIS cost report, typically because they have not yet submitted or been processed by CMS in the current HCRIS release.

Is probabilistic or fuzzy matching used?

The headline CCN join uses only exact 6-digit matches. The entity-resolution crosswalk (column 5) is tiered: 5,611 deterministic links (confidence 1.000) from CMS Care Compare ASC, which publishes NPI alongside CCN, plus 2,518 probabilistic name-and-state candidates (confidence at least 0.95 but below 1.000, shown per link) that have not yet passed operator review — these are always labeled "candidate · unreviewed" with their real confidence, never presented as deterministic. Each match method's real confidence range is shown in the breakdown above — deterministic links are never blended with probabilistic ones.

What is the entity-resolution column?

The Entity Links column shows the CCN → NPI crosswalk for each hospital, by tier. 5,611 links are deterministic (confidence 1.000) from CMS Care Compare Ambulatory Surgical Centers, and 2,518 are unreviewed probabilistic candidates shown with an explicit "candidate" label and their real confidence. Hospitals without a crosswalk entry are marked "Unlinked".

Fonteum is a US healthcare provenance registry that publishes signed, chain-of-custody-attested research and data pages on Medicare, Medicaid, and federal regulator datasets, drawing from 23 federal source families across CMS, OIG, HRSA, AHRQ, and HHS.

Reviewed by Jennifer Montecillo, MD, medical reviewer. Non-practicing medical reviewer.