About HCCI
The Health Care Cost Institute is an independent, nonprofit entity committed to creating the nation’s most comprehensive source of information on health care costs and utilization, and promoting research on the drivers of escalating health care costs and utilization in the U.S. As the first effort of its kind to create and maintain a regularly updated repository of commercial health care cost information, HCCI’s mission is to promote independent research and analysis on the causes of rising US health spending; to provide policy makers, consumers, and researchers with better, more transparent information on what is driving health care costs; and to help ensure that, over time, the nation is able to get greater value from its health spending.
The Institute provides researchers with the most comprehensive information available on health care spending and utilization trends through an exclusive centralized database of public- and private- sector health care data. At its launch, the database covered 5 billion medical claims and $1 trillion in health care activity from 2001 to the present, including $200 billion in 2010 alone. The database includes 5,000 hospitals and more than 1 million different medical service providers from commercial health plans operated by Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare. Medicaid data will not be available initially, but Medicare Advantage data from each participating plan will be included.
This new resource will be available to accredited researchers whose proposals meet HCCI’s data and scientific usage standards. Independent academic and actuarial researchers who meet appropriate qualifications can apply for access to the data to perform specific research projects. The Institute will also conduct in-depth analysis and projections on cost trends that inform public and private sector efforts to reduce health care costs while improving the quality and availability of coverage.