Report-Builder: Peer Service Lines

We are excited to announce we're adding our most powerful report to-date to Signal: Peer Service Lines! Peer Service Lines represents a breakthrough in the way you can analyze price transparency data in a rolled-up manner, giving you insights you've never seen before. Have you ever been interested in:

  • Comparing health system contracts as a percent of Medicare for all inpatient and outpatient services?
  • Comparing provider groups' rates across entire service lines, not just at the code level?
  • Summarizing reimbursement trends across providers relative to the baseline of your choice (e.g., Medicare, DRG Weights, Commercial Medians, etc.)?

With Peer Service Lines - you can now summarize reimbursement rates relative to a baseline (e.g., percent of Medicare) and rollup across codes and service lines so you can easily compare a target set of providers.

Entering Peer Service Lines

When you enter Signal, you will see 5 modes for exploring price transparency data:

  • 'Explore' mode is the go-to rates query engine for payer-posted and/or hospital-posted data
  • 'Compare' mode allows you to do comparisons across markets and providers
  • 'Peer Service Lines' mode should be used when you are comparing 2 or more providers across an entire service line or code grouping

Let's click on 'Peer Service Lines' to get started.


Setting up Peer Service Line reports

Once you enter the Peer Service Lines report mode, you will see the same set of panels you are familiar with — the following is required to generate a report:

  • 1 payer network (e.g., UnitedHealthcare Choice Plus PPO)
  • At least 1 service category OR at least 1 code
    • Service Categories are recommended in this mode — if you are searching at a code level, we recommend that you use Peer Rates mode
  • At least 1 provider EIN or provider group
    • Before using this report, we first recommend reading our provider search guide to understand concepts like a provider's EIN, Type-2 NPI and our provider groups article to make full use of peer rates' functionality
    • Once you have access to the right EINs, NPIs and/or Groups, you can generate a report simply by selecting which EINs / providers or groups you would like to see rates for and then clicking "Generate Report"

Serif Health's 'Service Categories'

As a note on Service Categories — this is a new feature that the Serif Health team has developed by grouping codes together based on usage in the real world. Our Service Categories are also separated into subcategories, and each level can be selected when building a report. For example, the "Inpatient (DRGs)" category can be selected to roll-up rates across all DRGs, or a subcategory can be selected if you are interested in specific DRG codes (e.g., Burns). Feel free to reach out to support@serifhealth.com if you have any questions around our categories and subcategories!

Interpreting results

Then, for your given set of selected providers and service categories / service subcategories / codes, Peer Service Lines will automatically display results relative to the relevant Medicare baseline (as a percentage of Medicare). You will be able to see a graphical representation at the top of the screen, with underlying details below it.

Now lets dive into all of the different toggles / features here.

The first toggle to point out is at the top - you can review results by:

  • Code (if you selected individual codes)
  • Service Category (if you selected a service category and/or subcategories)
  • Service Subcategory (if you selected a subcategory)
  • Provider

Picking Code will give you the percent of Medicare results for the individual codes you added to your search — in the example below, the user selected DRG 470 and 291 across 2 hospital groups.

  • The darker bars represent 2025 data, and the lighter bars represent 2024 data
  • You can hover over each bar to see the values
  • The underlying results are located at the bottom of the screen

Picking Service Category will give you results of all of the subcategories combined (based on the subcategories you selected in your search). When setting up a search, you can also just pick an overall category (without specifying a subcategory) to see results for the entire category.

Picking Service Subcategory will break out the results by subcategory - in the example below, we see DRGs broken out into diseases / disorders of the circulatory system, female reproductive system, kidney and urinary tract, etc...

Finally, picking Provider will show results across all the codes / service lines you selected rolled-up at the provider level. In the example below, across the DRGs that the user selected, it looks like HCA / TriStar in Tennessee receives on average 233% of Medicare (IPPS) with UnitedHealthcare Choice Plus PPO.


The next toggle to point out is at the bottom — where you can change the methodology you would like the system to use to aggregate results.

In the first button ("Select rates by"), you have the following options on how you would like the system to select rates for a given EIN / code combination:

In the second button ("See results by"), you have the following options on how you would like the system to display percent of baseline results:

  • Mode: Results are the most common percent of baseline across the service category / subcategory
  • Average: Results are the average percent of baseline across the service category / subcategory
  • Weighted Average: Results displayed are the sum of rates divided by the sum of baseline — this methodology will weight more expensive / higher cost codes higher than the lower cost codes
  • Median: Results are the median percent of baseline across the service category / subcategory
  • Note: This panel is only available when displaying results by Service Category or Service Subcategory

In the third button ("Apply"), you have the opportunity to select the relevant baseline that you would like to compare your results against. By Default — for each row of data, we bring in our best guess on what Medicare would pay (considering the code, modifier, place of service, location, and other details for each row of data), and results are displayed as a percent of Default. But you can override results to any baseline you would like (e.g., DRG Weights, CMS National Baselines, etc.) which will dynamically change results. For a comprehensive overview of our baseline methodology and override feature, please read this article: https://help.serifhealth.com/article/35-using-additional-baselines  

In our example from above, I can choose a "DRG Weights" baseline override and see results as base-rate conversion factors.

Lastly, if you would like to view all the information generated from the report, feel free to export the data to .csv.

If you need to edit or further narrow down your search, the following filters you are familiar with in search mode are available for use:

  • Payers: you can select a different payer network to perform a search on
  • Modifiers: by default, we exclude these to ensure apples-to-apples comparison
  • Other filters:
    • Arrangement: Defaulted to fee-for-service to again ensure valid, like-for-like comparison across distributions
    • Negotiation Type: Percentage of billed charges arrangements excluded to ensure all rates are comparable dollar amounts
    • Billing Class: Both professional and institutional provided by default; further filtering suggested to avoid mixing pro and facility fees
    • Is Billable: Balanced selected by default — more detail here: https://help.serifhealth.com/article/6-how-does-the-price-transparency-data-differ-from-claims-data
    • Hide Outliers: On by default to filter out 'noise' from placeholder rates (e.g., $99,999.99 for a 30 minute office visit)
    • Taxonomies: Allows you to filter only down to certain taxonomies

Other important notes:

  • Peer Service Lines only performs searches on entries in the 'EIN' field. This means we do not search Type-1 NPIs (e.g., individual professionals) in provider groups
  • For each payer and code, Peer Service Lines will aggregate across all the relevant 'EIN' entries in the provider group. For example, let's say your provider group has 2 EINs: '871927518', '841856765' and you search 90837 in Cigna:
    • The raw data has 3 entries: 1 for EIN 871927518 (top row) and 2 for EIN 841856765 (bottom two rows).

    • In Peer Service Lines, results will be calculated across all 3 entries

We hope this report is useful and would love to hear feedback on any enhancements or suggestions to further improve the platform. If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to reach out to support@serifhealth.com

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