Health care administrators, governing boards, and public policy groups employ a broad array of financial ratios to assess hospital performance. However, only a few ratios may be necessary for meaningful insight. Our paper explores the common financial characteristics of performance which can be accurately and parsimoniously summarized by hospital financial ratios. We define a characteristic of performance as a group of ratios which measure essentially the same financial activity of a firm (see footnote 1 in our paper). First, a statistical-based taxonomy of financial ratios was used to explore the financial characteristics of 2,189 U.S. hospitals. Second, the taxonomy was employed to examine the correlations among the specific ratios which signal the characteristics of financial performance. Our findings: 1) indicate that hospital financial characteristics of performance reported in our study are different from previously reported findings in the literature, (which are reviewed in our paper) and 2) provide suggestions for future research in determining the value of the identified characteristics for decision making in the health care industry.