“This (Free) DRG-Impact tool is designed to quantify the revenue impact of the final FY2027 MS-DRG rates by hospital and DRG. I hope you find this helpful and I welcome your feedback.” – Brian Cotter
This takes the Medicare cases a hospital actually treated in 2024 and prices them twice. Once at FY2026 rates, once at FY2027 rates. The case count is identical in both years, so every dollar of change shown here comes from what CMS did to the rates and the weights. Volume and coding are held still on purpose.
Here’s a sample of a portion of one query:
Based on this data Reference Based Pricing plans accessing this hospital may end up paying 4% more next year for the same services paid last year.
Go HERE, enter in any hospital name and view results in under 2 seconds………….for free.
ABOUT BRIAN COTTER
Brian Cotter – Founder & CEO, Bright Spot Insights LLC
A small firm with twenty-five years of judgment behind every number………..
Brian Cotter founded Bright Spot Insights in 2022 after twenty-five years inside some of the largest healthcare analytics organizations in the country. He started the firm to give plans, funds, and the consultants who advise them the kind of pricing clarity that large carriers have no incentive to produce.
The work is specific: mine paid claims for the spend carriers never flag, benchmark negotiated rates against Medicare, model direct-contracting alternatives, and build the analytical case for pricing decisions that would otherwise take years to move. The analytical approach was featured in a December 2025 Bloomberg News investigation and documented at length on Relentless Health Value Episode 501.
Bright Spot Insights is deliberately a one-person practice. Brian works directly with a short list of clients and leads every engagement personally — no handoffs, no layered account teams.