In January 2021, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) passed a federal law that requires hospitals to make the costs of standard healthcare services transparent. Investigators at the Brigham systematically analyzed a nationally representative sample of all Medicare-registered acute-care hospitals across the U.S. for compliance with this law. Two independent reviewers evaluated whether each hospital adhered to the 21-point CMS hospital price transparency checklist and compared non-teaching vs teaching hospitals, non-profit vs for-profit hospitals, and hospitals in regions with different levels of regional market competition.
Researchers found that only 1 in 5, or 19 percent, of hospitals were fully adherent to the entire checklist. Teaching and non-profit hospitals were slightly more compliant than non-teaching or for-profit hospitals. Further, only 8 percent of hospitals in competitive markets, where patients may benefit the most from being able to compare prices, were compliant, compared to 33 percent in non-competitive markets. Findings suggest nationwide, patients are often unable to access information about hospital charges for basic services.
“The transparency mandate ensures patients can estimate how much their medical care might cost and shop around amongst competing hospitals to find the best price,” said senior author Haider J. Warraich, MD, of BWH’s Division of Cardiovascular Medicine. “However, our analysis found low compliance with the mandate. More efforts are needed to improve the state of healthcare financial toxicity in the country.”
Read more in the Journal of General Internal Medicine .
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Survey
People
Hospital Adherence to the Federal Price Transparency Mandate: Results from a Nationally Representative Sample
17-Jan-2023
Emefah Loccoh has no disclosures. Rohan Khera received support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (under award K23HL153775) and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (under award, 2022060). He also receives research support, through Yale, from Bristol-Myers Squibb. He is a coinventor of U.S. Provisional Patent Applications 63/177,117 and 63/346,610, unrelated to current work. He is also a founder of Evidence2Health, a precision health platform to improve evidence-based cardiovascular care. Jeroen van Meijgaard and Tori Marsh are employees of GoodRx. Haider Warraich is a member of the GoodRx medical advisory board.