An atlas of hospital prices · Colorado
What hospitals actually charge, compared without the noise.
This atlas exists to make it easier for Coloradans to shop for hospital care. The federal price-transparency files are public, but unreadable on their own — we turn them into apples-to-apples comparisons across the hospitals near you.
Under the hood: the complete CMS dataset for Colorado — 59 hospitals, 33.9 million negotiated rates, 311K procedure codes — presented side-by-side. Of Colorado’s ~120 hospitals, ~80 are subject to the federal MRF rule; we successfully parse 59, and the other 21 publish files we can’t yet read or that fail validation (tracked on the methodology page).
On top, our editorial atlas curates 50 of the procedures Coloradans shop for most, organised into collections — preventive care at 50+, adult vaccines, cancer screening, imaging, labs, heart — plus a most-shopped list below.
Truly free — no ads, no paywall, no data sold to brokers. Published by Generative Inspired.
Start here
All collections →Curated views into the same dataset, designed around the questions our readers actually ask.
Preventive care for adults 50+
47 proceduresVaccines, cancer screens, and the lab panels on the USPSTF schedule for adults 50–64.
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Preventive care on Medicare (65+)
50 proceduresWhat Medicare beneficiaries should expect to pay (or not pay) for preventive and routine care.
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Cancer screening
6 proceduresMammography, low-dose lung CT, colonoscopy, sigmoidoscopy, and PSA — the screens that catch the most-common cancers early.
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Preventive vaccines
6 proceduresShingrix, Pneumovax 23, Prevnar 20, the flu shot, RSV, and Tdap — the adult immunisation schedule.
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Heart & cardiovascular
8 proceduresFrom everyday ECG and lipid panel through stress test, echocardiogram, and inpatient heart-failure care.
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Imaging tests
10 proceduresMRI, CT, ultrasound, X-ray, and DEXA — where the largest hospital-to-hospital price spreads show up.
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Most-shopped procedures
All 50 →The procedures Colorado readers come here looking for most often — jump straight to the cross-hospital comparison.
Latest from the editorial desk
All articles →Plain-English explainers on hospital price transparency, the CMS rule, and how to read the data.
6 min read Ashwin Pingali
How to estimate your hospital bill in Colorado
A step-by-step guide to estimating your out-of-pocket cost using a hospital's published negotiated rate, your plan's deductible and coinsurance, and a real Colorado example. An estimate, not a quote.
8 min read Ashwin Pingali
The hospital bill glossary: 14 terms every patient should know
Plain-English definitions of CPT, HCPCS, MS-DRG, APC, NDC, EOB, deductible, coinsurance, OOP-max, facility fee, professional fee, cash price, gross charge, negotiated rate, and chargemaster.
8 min read Ashwin Pingali
What is a hospital machine-readable file (MRF)?
A plain-English primer on the hospital MRF — what 45 CFR §180.50 requires, the four CMS file formats, the code systems, and what the file omits.
Every procedure
All 50 procedures
The full list, grouped by category.
Hospitals
All 59 Colorado hospitals
Ranked by data depth — 33.9M rate observations.
How we built it
Methodology
What we do, what we deliberately don't do, and what's coming next.
Coming next
Distance-based search (“within 25 miles of my zip”), plan-specific filtering, hospital quality scores alongside the prices, and additional states. The full roadmap, with the honest constraints, is in this article. For how today’s comparisons are built, see the methodology.