Where every figure comes from
Thalarx draws on 24 reference planes across 6 families. Every rate, actual, quality mark, and dispute outcome stored by the platform carries the published file it came from and a locator precise enough for a human to re-check it.
The full registry
The board above is what this database holds facts from today. The catalogue below is the registered plane family list — the intended coverage, of which the loaded planes are a subset. The two are different questions and are shown separately on purpose.
Rates & Payments · 9
| Plane | Role | Access | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hospital Price Transparency MRFs | Primary source of hospital negotiated rates by payer and plan. Per-hospital discovery, wildly inconsistent schemas — the hardest and most valuable plane in the registry. | probe | annual |
| Payer Transparency in Coverage MRFs | Payer-side view of negotiated rates. Enormous files; the cross-check against hospital-published MRFs and the way to see what a payer pays competitors. | bulk | monthly |
| Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners PUF | Actuals: services, average billed, allowed, and paid per NPI per code. Populates the actuals table and grounds every benchmark in observed volume. | bulk | annual |
| Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) | The denominator. Percent-of-Medicare is the lingua franca of rate negotiation; without PFS no commercial rate is interpretable. | bulk | annual |
| Hospital Outpatient PPS Addenda (OPPS) | Outpatient Medicare benchmark by APC. The hospital-outpatient counterpart to PFS. | bulk | quarterly |
| IPPS / MS-DRG payment files | Inpatient Medicare benchmark. DRG weights plus wage-index adjustment are required to make any inpatient case-rate comparison honest. | bulk | annual |
| Clinical Lab, ASC, and DMEPOS fee schedules | Benchmarks for the ancillary settings that fall outside PFS and OPPS. Frequently where the largest unexamined rate gaps sit. | bulk | quarterly |
| Medicare Hospital Provider PUFs (Inpatient & Outpatient) | Hospital-level actuals keyed by CCN. The facility analogue of the practitioner PUF. | bulk | annual |
| HCRIS hospital cost reports | Cost structure and payer mix by facility. Turns a rate argument into a margin argument — the only plane that shows what care actually costs the provider. | bulk | quarterly |
Codes · 5
| Plane | Role | Access | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| HCPCS Level II | Public code set for supplies, drugs, and non-physician services. Freely redistributable — carries descriptors we may show verbatim. | bulk | quarterly |
| CPT (licensed) | The dominant procedure vocabulary. LICENSED — descriptor text may not be redistributed without an AMA agreement. Thalarx ships its own plain-language descriptions (packages/reference-data/descriptors.ts) until a license is in hand. | cite | annual |
| ICD-10-CM / ICD-10-PCS | Diagnosis and inpatient procedure vocabulary. Required to interpret DRG assignment and case-mix arguments. | bulk | annual |
| NCCI edits and Medically Unlikely Edits | Which code pairs may be billed together and at what unit ceiling. Distinguishes a genuine underpayment from a claim that was never payable as billed. | bulk | quarterly |
| Groupers (MS-DRG, APC, APR-DRG) | Maps coded encounters to payment groups. Without grouper logic, inpatient and outpatient rate comparison is guesswork. | bulk | annual |
Provider Identity · 2
| Plane | Role | Access | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| NPPES | Identity spine. Resolves an org name plus state into the NPI roster that defines a tenant footprint — the first call made at onboarding. | api | monthly |
| POS / CCN crosswalk | Bridges NPI to CCN to facility. The join that lets practitioner-keyed and facility-keyed planes describe the same organization. | bulk | quarterly |
Quality · 5
| Plane | Role | Access | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMS Care Compare | Public star ratings and measure-level quality data. The most widely recognized quality currency in a payer conversation. | api | quarterly |
| HRRP / HAC / VBP penalty programs | Penalty and incentive standing. Converts quality position into a dollar figure Medicare already assigned. | bulk | annual |
| STS National Database | Cardiac surgery outcomes at specialty depth. Where a cardiac program's leverage actually lives; cited rather than bulk-ingested. | cite | annual |
| SRTR | Transplant program outcomes. Small number of tenants, but for those tenants it is the decisive quality plane. | cite | biannual |
| Hospital rankings and recognitions | Reputational marks. Weak evidence analytically, real leverage rhetorically — carried as citations, never as computed quality. | cite | annual |
Disputes & Enforcement · 2
| Plane | Role | Access | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Federal IDR Public Use File | No Surprises Act arbitration outcomes: who filed, who won, awards against QPA. Populates disputes and is the strongest single negotiating exhibit. | bulk | quarterly |
| Payer policy watchtower | Detects payer policy changes before they hit remittance. Per-payer crawl with change detection; the early-warning plane. | probe | continuous |
Market Context · 1
| Plane | Role | Access | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial rate and market studies | Regional price-level and concentration context. Frames a tenant's position against the market rather than only against Medicare. | cite | annual |