Price Transparency
Hospitals and health systems are committed to empowering patients and their families with all the information they need to live their healthiest lives. This includes ensuring they have access to accurate and timely price information when seeking care. Hospitals and health systems have made important progress in adopting federal price transparency requirements that require they both publicly post machine-readable files of a wide range of rate information and provide more consumer-friendly displays of pricing information for at least 300 shoppable services.
AHA today recommended that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services convene a multi-stakeholder process to advance price transparency in health care.
AHA provides input to CMS on how to better assist patients in accessing pricing information for health care services.
Reducing regulations and expanding care models that ensure coordination and reward performance are two ways to address health care prices, AHA General Counsel Melinda Hatton said today during a Kaiser Family Foundation panel discussion focused on the issue.
Making Charges Transparent: Things to Consider
Present charge information in a way that is understandable to and usable by the general public.
People deserve meaningful information about the price of their hospital care. Hospitals are committed to sharing information that will help people make important decisions about their health care. Sharing pricing information, however, is more challenging because hospital care is unique.
At an AHA briefing Jan. 20 in Washington, D.C., hospital and business leaders discussed the many ways hospitals are adapting to a changing health care landscape.
2014 Advocacy Issue Paper
Achieving Price Transparency for Consumers: A Toolkit for Hospitals (July 2014)
Price Transparency Efforts Accelerate: What Hospitals and Other Stakeholders Are Doing to Support Consumers, TrendWatch (July 2014)
Illness or injury is stressful for patients and families, and the added uncertainty around how much care will cost can be overwhelming—especially for patients without insurance. With all that today’s health care system has to offer, health care services can represent a major financial investment—…
In September 2004, ProHealth Care went public with its Consumer Inquiry Line, a 24-hour hotline that consumers can call to learn charges for common health care procedures.