New research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Internal Medicine reports hospital price discrepancies continue three years after the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created the Price Transparency Requirements for Hospitals to Make Standard Charges Public rule. The rule requires all non-federal, non-tribal hospitals that are licensed in each state to list their standard charges for all items and services provided.
This research is among the first to attempt to investigate the validity of hospitals’ pricing transparency data relative to other pricing benchmarks. “While this study doesn’t explicitly assess the accuracy of these price transparency data files,” says co-author Morgan Henderson , principal data scientist at The Hilltop Institute at UMBC , “By comparing them to telephone-based price estimates, we demonstrate that something (either the accuracy of the price transparency data, or the accuracy of telephone estimates, or both) isn’t working particularly well.”
The new cross-sectional study compares 60 U.S. hospitals’ online cash prices with their over-the-phone cash prices for vaginal childbirth and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Data was collected between August and October 2022 from secret shopper phone calls to 20 top-ranked hospitals as well as 20 safety-net hospitals (accept patients who cannot pay) and 20 non-top-ranked, non-safety-net hospitals.
The study found that online prices hospitals are required to post were missing for 47 percent of hospitals for childbirth and 10 percent for MRIs, said Merina Thomas, a doctoral student at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, the lead author of the paper.
“Among those hospitals where prices were available online, the online price often did not match the prices provided over the phone,” Thomas said to utmb Health . “For example, a hospital might have an online price for an MRI of $2,000 but give a phone price of $5,000, or an online childbirth price of $20,000 but a phone price of $10,000.”
The paper was authored by Thomas; Peter Cram , professor of internal medicine at UTMB; Cuban; James Flaherty, UTMB medical student; Jiefei Wang , assistant professor of biostatistics and data sciences at UTMB; Henderson; and Vivian Ho , professor of economics at The Baker Institute of Public Policy at Rice University.
JAMA Internal Medicine
10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.4753
Experimental study
Not applicable
Comparison of Hospital Online Price and Telephone Price for Shoppable Services
18-Sep-2023
My company does medical mystery shopping. I have expertise in this area.