![]() ![]() For example, the hospital may redirect to a vendor URL or a separate point-and-click tool with a data download button. Sometimes, the data sets may be trickier to obtain and sort out. The files are usually available under a section of the site that is titled something like “Price Transparency,” “Billing,” or ”Financial Services.” For a one-off file, you can typically use a search engine and search for keywords like “ price transparency” and find the data set without too many clicks. Thanks to the Hospital Price Transparency Rule, providers are required to post files publicly on their websites. ![]() It's also a lot like this: ** Cries in engineer ** Data Acquisitionįirst, we need to acquire the pricing data. This is called Type 2 Fun: it hurts when it’s happening but it’s satisfying in hindsight. In the rest of this blog, we hope to pull back the curtain on how we parse hospital pricing data and illustrate some of the challenges of doing it at scale. Lots of thinking went into developing our scorecard methodology (which you can read here) but we still often get questions as to how one might begin to parse, think about, and make sense of raw price transparency data. This is one of the reasons that we created the Machine-Readable File Transparency Scorecard: to create a data quality feedback loop. ![]() This also creates some uncertainty as to whether hospitals are following the rule correctly. On the other hand, the flexibility creates difficulty for healthcare purchasers in making price comparisons. On one hand, the lack of a strict standard offers flexibility in the choice of file format, choice of structure, and it allows providers to post information beyond the regulatory minimums. self-pay, non-insured rates, discounted cash price). contracted rates), and cash rates (a.k.a. chargemaster rates, charge description master, CDM rates), negotiated rates with commercial insurance (a.k.a. Hospitals are required to post a machine-readable file that displays all “list prices” (a.k.a. Without a standard file format to follow, every hospital posted their prices in their own custom format. But unlike the newer Transparency in Coverage regulations that cover payers, CMS did not specify a standard file format for the provider price transparency machine-readable files (MRF). Starting in 2021, hospitals were required to post their prices online. ![]()
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