Raising penalties for failure to comply with federal hospital price transparency requirements is increasing compliance with those requirements.
Or so concludes a new JAMA Network report.
According to a recently published study that examined nearly 4400 acute-care hospitals,
… compliance with the 2021 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Price Transparency Rule increased from 70.4% in 2021 to 87.7% in 2022. Increases in compliance were significantly positively correlated with penalty size, which changed from a flat rate to a function of hospital bed counts.
Compliance with the requirement, which took effect at the beginning of 2021, was already generally high, but an increase in the penalty for non-compliance that took effect at the beginning of 2022 appears to have had the desired effect of giving hospitals a greater incentive to improve their price transparency.
Learn more about how the study was conducted and what it found in the JAMA Network report “Provision of Hospital Price Information After Increases in Financial Penalties for Failure to Comply With a US Federal Hospital Price Transparency Rule.”