Dive Brief:

• Looking at 2,000 U.S. hospitals’ websites, only about a quarter were in full compliance with federal price transparency rules, according to a new analysis from PatientRightsAdvocate.org.
• The majority of hospitals have some required files posted, but most are incomplete, illegible or do not clearly identify prices both associated with payer and plan, according to the report. Some 6% of the hospitals posted no usable pricing files.
• This latest report calls out both major for-profit and nonprofit chains across the country for not following the rules, including HCA Healthcare, Tenet, Providence and UPMC, which lacked any compliant hospitals.

Dive Insight:

The Federal Price Transparency Rule, created to help patients shop for their treatments, has encountered widespread violations since its inception.

Under this rule, which came into force almost two years ago, hospitals are required to provide a list of standard rates for all items and services for all payers and plans, and 300 most common procedures or pricing tools.

Hospitals are making progress, but an earlier analysis by the same organization of 1,500 hospitals last February found 14% complying with the rules — 75% according to the latest report. still does not adhere to the patient’s ability to make meaningful price comparisons: pre-grooming.

According to the report, about half of the hospitals eventually published negotiated rates that were clearly tied to payers and plans, but about half of these hospitals’ rate data were still missing or missing. It was incomplete.

About 20% of hospitals published a list of common procedures in an easy-to-use format, but nearly 90% of them published incomplete files for a standard fee. Additionally, 86% of hospitals published pricing tools, but 73% of them also published an incomplete file of standard rates.

Given the widespread non-compliance of the past year, as part of an effort to get more hospitals to share the necessary pricing data, HHS has imposed fines of up to $2 million for non-compliant hospitals. raised to dollars.

To date, authorities have fined only two hospitals, and HHS has not imposed any additional penalties, according to the report.

His two facilities in Georgia in the same system were fined a total of $1.1 million in June for failing to publish a comprehensive list of standard rates. The report also identified that some hospitals had “relapsed” or were non-compliant after previously being considered compliant.

Although some systems were not compliant, reports show that approximately 58% of CommonSpirit-owned hospitals and 73% of Lifepoint Health hospitals were compliant.

In a statement to the Healthcare Dive, the HCA called reports like the Patients Rights Advocate “flawed,” saying that the hospital was implementing federal transparency requirements as of January 2021 and that its The website said it includes a consumer-facing patient payment tool, along with published contracts for one-third the price. — Party Payer in machine-readable form.

Originally published at https://businessdor.com on February 6, 2023.