Tracking U.S. Hospital Ownership and Consolidation
A public data set tracking hospital ownership and trends
Who owns America’s hospitals and how is ownership shifting from year to year? An accurate, publicly accessible record can be hard to come by.
This data set fills that gap, mapping the ownership of more than 3,000 U.S. acute care and critical access hospitals across six consecutive years, 2020 through 2025. Each hospital is linked to the hospital system that owned it at the close of the year. Hospital characteristics such as size, teaching status, nonprofit status, and location are included.
Researchers, journalists, and policymakers can use this data to see which hospitals changed hands, which systems grew, and how the balance between independent and system-owned hospitals has shifted.
Use of this data is limited to personal and academic noncommercial purposes and must cite the Lown Institute as the source. To inquire about data use other than personal or academic, contact us at info@lowninstitute.org.
Download: Hospital ownership data
What’s in the download
The dataset is organized as a set of thirteen plain-text CSV files:
- Hospital attributes, one file per year (2020–2025). One row per hospital per year, keyed by CMS Certification Number (CCN). Each row includes the hospital’s name, full address, county, state, bed count, ownership category (non-profit, for-profit, or government), hospital type (Acute Care or Critical Access), geographic classifications (metro / micro / rural, Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas, and Dartmouth Atlas Hospital Referral Region), and the identifier and name of the health system that owned it at year’s end.
- Health system companion files, one file per year (2020–2025). One row per system per year, with the system’s name, headquarters location, control type (private non-profit, public non-profit, for-profit, or mixed), member-hospital and bed totals, and, where available, a crosswalk to the AHRQ Compendium of U.S. Health Systems.
- A data dictionary documenting every field, its type, and its source.
Because each hospital carries a stable CCN and each system a stable identifier across all six years, the files can be joined into a longitudinal panel — making it straightforward to trace an individual hospital’s ownership history or a system’s growth over time.
Project team
Vikas Saini, MD, president; Paula Smith, MPH, senior data scientist; Kelsey Chalmers, PhD, director of research; Carissa Fu, chief of staff; Vivien Talon, project intern; Judith Garber, MPP, senior policy analyst; Noelle Serino, policy analyst; Valerie Gopinath, MS, senior director of data science; Aaron Toleos, vice president of communications; Brenna Miller, MPH, health communications manager
This project is supported through funding from Arnold Ventures.
Inquiries
If you have questions about the project, contact Carissa Fu, chief of staff, at cfu@lowninstitute.org.
Media inquiries should be directed to Aaron Toleos, vp of communications, at atoleos@lowninstitute.org.
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