Second, an adjustment to the CSHS methodology to mitigate the impact of multi-year inpatient stays should increase the stability 6 Understanding Variability in the Cost of a Standard Hospital Stay and accuracy of the indicator over time without affecting the variation among peers within a given year. [...] In general, the smaller the hospital, the greater the distance to the mean (Figure 4). [...] Over the course of the analysis, the EAG offered feedback on various components of the report and helped to validate the results of the analyses. [...] Nevertheless, the results indicate that the variability of the indirect expenses has relatively little influence on the variability of the indicator as a whole. [...] The net effect on the CSHS will be to increase the denominator and therefore decrease the value of the CSHS.