Price Transparency
Hospitals and health systems are committed to empowering patients and their families with all the information they need to live their healthiest lives. This includes ensuring they have access to accurate and timely price information when seeking care. Hospitals and health systems have made important progress in adopting federal price transparency requirements that require they both publicly post machine-readable files of a wide range of rate information and provide more consumer-friendly displays of pricing information for at least 300 shoppable services.
The RAND Corporation recently released the fifth iteration of its biannual hospital price report. The AHA highlights the significant flaws in this latest iteration.
In what is becoming an all too familiar pattern, the RAND Corporation鈥檚 latest hospital price report oversells and underwhelms. Their analysis 鈥 which despite much heralded data expansions 鈥 still represents less than 2% of overall hospital spending. This offers a skewed and incomplete picture of鈥
AHA expects the release of a new price transparency report next week. See AHA resources to prepare your organization鈥檚 response to the study findings.
On April 11th, 2024 Dr. Terri Postma, M.D., medical officer and senior advisor at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, discussed the changes to requirements for hospital price transparency and machine-readable format, and presented real-world examples of how to encode data for鈥
CMS March 28 released an updated online validator tool that hospitals can use to test price transparency machine-readable files against the new format and data specifications going into effect on July 1, 2024, and Jan. 1, 2025.
The AHA shares comments on the topic of national health expenditures before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health .
Price estimator tools are currently patients鈥 best and most consumer-friendly source of
information. They
AHA comments regarding the ongoing government funding discussion, AHA Urges Congress to eliminate Medicaid DSH cuts, reject Site-neutral payments.
At least 91% of hospitals had posted a machine-readable file containing rate information by the end of 2023, according to a new analysis by Turquoise Health.
AHA comments regarding provisions in the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act (H.R. 5378).