Hospitals backslide on price transparency test
Pricing transparency report cards for 2024 are out, and the grades for U.S. hospitals have dipped for the first time since the federal government reset the standards in 2021, at least according to one group’s accounting.
The latest semi-annual hospital price transparency report from nonprofit Patient Rights Advocate shows 34.5% of hospitals are compliant with the federal Hospital Price Transparency rule, down from 36% last summer. This breaks a steady streak of improvements dating back to the first of the nonprofit’s analyses, published in July 2021, in which fewer than 6% of hospitals made the grade.
“With full transparency, consumers can benefit from competition to make informed decisions, protect from overcharges, billing errors, and fraud, and lower their costs,” reads the report. “Employer and union plans can use pricing and claims data to improve their plan designs and direct members to lower cost, high-quality facilities. However, continued noncompliance impedes this ability. The majority of consumers are still blind to see upfront hospital prices, employer-sponsored healthcare premiums have increased 50% in the last decade, and 100 million Americans are in medical debt for charges they could not know in advance.”
Results were based on an analysis of publicly posted pricing information from 2,000 hospitals across the country. Posted data was checked for compliance with transparency regulation, and then added to a free, searchable database hosted by Patient Rights Advocate at hospitalpricingfiles.org.
The Hospital Price Transparency Rule, which took effect January 2021, requires hospitals to post all prices online, and in an easily accessible and searchable format. It’s the latter point that’s become an issue, with the majority of the noncompliant hospitals posting some kind of data, just with incomplete info or unwieldy formatting. Only 4.4% of hospitals reviewed failed to post any usable pricing file.
Community Health Systems had 100% compliance among its hospitals. Other networks getting a shout out in the report included Christus Health (93%) and Advocate Health (84%).
Beyond encoded files, a significant number of noncompliant hospitals had data charts in which the same service was listed on multiple rows instead of consolidated, or data was posted across multiple files. These seemingly small errors make data much harder to programmatically scan and frustrate pricing comparison studies.
Breaking data up across multiple files cost Kaiser Permanente its spot near the head of the class, as last year 98% of the network’s hospitals were fully complying, but a change in how they post that data now means none of Kaiser’s hospitals are compliant. Other notable networks failing to post a single compliant hospital included HCA, Tenet, Avera, UPMC, Baylor Scott & White, and Mercy.
Evan joined TriMed in 2011, writing primarily for Health Imaging. Prior to diving into medical journalism, Evan worked for the Nine Network of Public Media in St. Louis. He also has worked in public relations and education. Evan studied journalism at the University of Missouri, with an emphasis on broadcast media.