Hospitals’ compliance with federal price transparency regulations declined during 2024.
According to the organization PatientRightsAdvocate.org, hospital compliance with the federal standard fell from 34.5 percent in February of this year to 21.1 percent in November.
Under federal guidelines, hospitals are required to post payer-specific rates for their 300 most common procedures and those postings must be made in a consumer-friendly format. PatientRightsAdvocate.org reviewed the postings of 2000 hospitals and found that while all of them posted data in the appropriate format, the quality of that data varied greatly. While the objective of the requirement is to enable consumers to use such data to shop for services based on price, only 17 percent of the hospitals the group reviewed posted data that would enable consumer price comparisons.
Why the decline in compliance?
PatientRightsAdvocate.org believes federal oversight has been weak, enabling hospitals to post in formats that are not entirely user-friendly and do not clearly link listed prices with specific payers, as regulators envisioned when they established the requirements, which went into effect in 2021.
Learn more about hospital compliance with federal price transparency requirements from the Healthcare Dive article “Hospital price transparency continues to drop: report” and from the PatientRightsAdvocate.org report “Seventh Semi-Annual Hospital Price Transparency Report: