Exploring the Price Transparency Rule With ADVI's Caitlin Sheetz

The Trump administration’s price transparency rule requires hospitals to disclose what they could charge for basic items and services. The rule took place at the beginning of 2021 after getting approval from a U.S. appellate court.

ADVI, a pharma and healthcare consulting firm, released a report about hospitals’ early compliance with the price transparency rule. Caitlin Sheetz, head of analytics and director at ADVI, recently broke down the findings of the report to Chief Healthcare Executive™, as well as how the rule might affect pricing at hospitals and competition.

ADVI searched on the websites of 20 of the largest U.S. hospitals based on bed size to find available price transparency data. The organization downloaded all the available files and looked through any of the online pricing tools to determine what information hospitals were disclosing. Once compiled, ADVI tried to make comparisons for pricing for various institutions and made notes about the formatting of the published data and how comprehensive the data were compared to the requirements of the mandate.

Of the hospitals analyzed, there was some type of published data on all the websites. Some information was easier to find. The data were inconsistent throughout each website and there was no standardization of descriptors. Hospitals also used a variety of terms to define particular items.

So far, the analysis showed the websites were comprehensive enough to cause an impact on pricing due to the impact of transparency.