Interpreting medical claims data with visual analytics

Sep 17th, 2025

The healthcare industry generates as much as 30 percent of the world’s stored data. A single patient creates an estimated 80 megabytes in medical imaging and electronic medical record (EMR) data each year, while the average hospital produces around 50 petabytes of data in that time.

Patient and provider information of this volume has the power to inform stakeholder sales strategies, fuel innovation, and improve care outcomes. But there’s a catch: In order to utilize healthcare claims data to your advantage, you must be able to understand and interpret it.

For example, let’s say your data and research indicates that a company developing medical devices for congestive heart failure (CHF) patients had a potential market of nearly 2 million U.S. patients. How do you put this information into a more meaningful context? How do you shape all of this available data into an actionable strategy?

Data visualization tools create stories around analytics and allow people to see and understand the data in a way that they might not have been able to before. With access to a tool like the DHC Visuals dashboard, users can see proprietary data, account intelligence, and all-payor claims analytics displayed in one interactive, graphic layout.

In this blog, we’ll look at three ways that you can leverage data visualization tools to inform your business and drive your sales strategy.

1. Determine your best territory plan

Visually engaging, interactive maps provide users with an at-a-glance method for gauging both national and regional market size—giving you a visual representation of where those nearly 2 million congestive heart failure patients are seeking treatment.

The heatmap pictured below shows CHF patient concentrations by hospital, with the size of each plot point representing relative hospital patient volumes. At a first glance, users can see that the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest regions report the highest volumes of congestive heart failure patients. From there, they can focus their sales efforts in those areas with the greatest patient demand. The map below doesn’t include data for the states of Alaska or Hawaii, as the two states contributed an insignificant volume for the purposes of displaying the data.

2023 CHF patient volume by hospital

Fig 1. Analysis of data from the DHC Visuals Hospital Therapy Area Analytics dashboard for congestive heart failure. Medical claims data is sourced from the CMS Medicare SAF for the 2023 claims year.

On the DHC Visuals dashboard, users can access a list of the top hospitals either by national market or by selected regional market. The list populates hospital-level details like total number of CHF patients, total charges, number of ER visits, length of stay, CHF patient readmission rates, and more.

Using this data, we’ve created a list of the top 20 hospitals by total CHF patients. Patient counts are unique per hospital.

Hospitals ranked by CHF patient volume

Explore dataset

Rank	Definitive ID	Hospital name	State	# of CHF patients	Explore dataset
1	541974	NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center	NY	6,399	Explore
2	873	AdventHealth Orlando (FKA Florida Hospital Orlando)	FL	6,300	Explore
3	2843	Tisch Hospital	NY	5,507	Explore
4	430	Cedars-Sinai Medical Center	CA	4,035	Explore
5	3525	Lehigh Valley Hospital - Cedar Crest	PA	4,006	Explore
6	2191	Mayo Clinic Hospital - Saint Marys Campus	MN	3,905	Explore
7	1973	Massachusetts General Hospital	MA	3,775	Explore
8	3862	Methodist Hospital	TX	3,743	Explore
9	920	Sarasota Memorial Hospital	FL	3,249	Explore
10	2687	Morristown Medical Center	NJ	3,243	Explore
11	1154	Evanston Hospital (AKA NorthShore Evanston Hospital)	IL	3,189	Explore
12	744	Christiana Hospital	DE	3,172	Explore
13	4271	Inova Fairfax Hospital (AKA Inova Fairfax Medical Campus)	VA	3,131	Explore
14	2830	St Francis Hospital & Heart Center (AKA St Francis Hospital - The Heart Center)	NY	3,071	Explore
15	3120	Cleveland Clinic Main Campus	OH	3,041	Explore
16	576749	Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville (FKA BMC Downtown)	FL	2,808	Explore
17	274147	Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital	TX	2,778	Explore
18	1678	Norton Hospital	KY	2,778	Explore
19	1940	Baystate Medical Center	MA	2,757	Explore
20	731	Yale New Haven Hospital	CT	2,740	Explore

Fig 2. Analysis of CHF patient volume data from the DHC Visuals Hospital Therapy Area Analytics dashboard for the 2023 claims year. Data is sourced from the CMS Medicare SAF.

From the data, New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center had the highest volume of CHF patients across the U.S. in 2023. Identifying these high-volume hospitals allows users to map their target territories and form a strong lead base before executing a sales strategy.

2. Trace referral patterns and identify network leakage

Tracing referral patterns is an easy way to highlight relationships between hospitals and other local healthcare providers like long-term care centers or, in this case, rehabilitation facilities. Users can leverage this information to learn about how specific facilities refer their patients and where they may be receiving other patient referrals from.

On the DHC Visuals dashboard, outbound referrals are represented by either a blue or orange line—denoting either in-network or out-of-network referral—connecting the originating hospital to the destination facility. The strength of the line illustrates the number of outbound referrals, with bolder lines representing the highest referral volumes.

2023 New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center outbound CHF referrals

Trace referral patterns and identify network leakage

Fig 3. Outbound referrals featured on the DHC Visuals Hospital Therapy Area Analytics dashboard for congestive heart failure. Medical claims data sourced from CMS Medicare SAF for the year 2023.

This dashboard shows CHF outbound referrals from New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. The data highlights where patients are referred to when they require care outside the originating hospital, including whether those referrals stay in-network or go out-of-network.

The data reveals that the hospital is experiencing significant out-of-network referral leakage for congestive heart failure patients, with nearly all referrals going to external hospitals rather than staying within the network. Tisch Hospital receives the highest volume of referrals (64), followed by Montefiore Hospital’s Moses Campus (44), Maimonides Medical Center (36), and Mount Sinai Hospital (34), indicating that these facilities are capturing a substantial share of patients.

While most referrals remain within the New York City area, there is a noticeable regional spread into Westchester County, Long Island, and even northern New Jersey, suggesting that patient movement extends beyond the immediate local market.

Altogether, these findings highlight a major opportunity for New York-Presbyterian to reduce referral leakage by expanding in-network service offerings, strengthening relationships with cardiologists and referring providers, and improving patient navigation programs.

What does this mean for you? Identifying network leakage can be a strategic way to cater your sales approach to fit the specific pain points of a given hospital or facility.

3. Discover new patient and provider insights

Using data visualization technology, stakeholders can access advanced healthcare intelligence in a snap. Tools like the Atlas All-Payor Claims dataset unify hospital, physician, and medical claims data to deliver comprehensive industry insights.

The Definitive Healthcare platform puts your patient cohort data into an actionable context. With this tool, you can build customized patient cohorts to discover a hyper-targeted set of providers with the greatest number of treatment-ready patients.

Our platform not only helps you identify your total addressable market by region but also helps you discover patterns in shared patient comorbidities, physician referrals, prescription use, and treatment histories—giving you the insight to turn data into action.

Learn more

Interested in learning more about how you can leverage data analytics to shape your next sales strategy? We’re here to help. Start a free trial today and discover intelligence from Definitive Healthcare can help you understand the patients, providers, facilities, and technologies that define the healthcare landscape.

About the Author

Ethan Popowitz

Ethan Popowitz is a Senior Content Writer at Definitive Healthcare. He writes data-driven articles about telehealth, AI, the healthcare staffing shortage, and everything in…

Author profile