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On average, 78 percent of hospital beds in the state were filled during the 2014 fiscal year, and patients stayed an average of five days. Connecticut’s acute care hospitals earned an average margin of 6.22 percent that year. And overall, 42 percent of their patients were covered by Medicare, 31 percent had private insurance and just under a quarter had Medicaid.

But when it comes to hospitals, averages don’t tell the full story. Instead, they mask significant differences between Connecticut’s 28 acute-care hospitals.

This database is aimed at helping you dig deeper.

For example, seven hospitals had at least 90 percent of their staffed beds filled during the 2014 fiscal year (Bridgeport, Griffin, New Milford, Hartford, Danbury, Charlotte Hungerford, and Waterbury), while two had occupancy rates below 60 percent (Windham – 42 percent – and UConn’s John Dempsey Hospital – 58 percent).

Financial performance varied widely too. Backus Hospital in Norwich topped the state with a 13.8 percent margin during the 2015 fiscal year, while Milford Hospital continued several years of financial struggles with a negative 7.2 percent margin.

And the types of coverage patients had varied widely by hospital too. For example, in 2014, just 3 percent of Greenwich Hospital’s patients were covered by Medicaid (which pays less than other types of coverage), compared to 54 percent of those at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford and 33 percent at Bridgeport Hospital, the second-highest.

There’s plenty of information about hospitals available publicly, if you know where to look. In this database, The Mirror has complied information from the state Department of Public Health, the Connecticut Office of Health Care Access, and a hospital inspections database run by the Association of Health Care Journalists.

You can use this tool to see some basic data on each hospital, including how many beds are filled, how many people work there, how they’re doing financially, and what kind of insurance coverage their patients have. You can also find information on rates of infection and links to hospital inspections.

To access the database, click here. You’ll always be able to access it from our Citizen’s Toolbox on the right of our homepage.

Arielle Levin Becker covered health care for The Connecticut Mirror. She previously worked for The Hartford Courant, most recently as its health reporter, and has also covered small towns, courts and education in Connecticut and New Jersey. She was a finalist in 2009 for the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists, a recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the third-place winner in 2013 for an in-depth piece on caregivers from the National Association of Health Journalists. She is a 2004 graduate of Yale University.

Andrew is a former data editor at TrendCT.org and The Connecticut Mirror. He taught data visualization at Central Connecticut State University as well intro to data journalism at Wesleyan University as a Koeppel Fellow. He was a founding producer of The Boston Globe's Data Desk where he used a variety of methods to visualize or tell stories with data. Andrew also was an online producer at The Virginian-Pilot and a staff writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. He’s a Metpro Fellow, a Chips Quinn Scholar, and a graduate of the University of Texas.

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