Only 36% of hospitals are fully complying with the rule, while forty hospitals exhibited backsliding on compliance, a new report says.
A new review of price transparency adherence was released by Patient Rights Advocate, and it calls out major players who it says are noncompliant with the law.
Conducted two and a half years after the hospital price transparency rule took effect, the report analyzed the websites of 2,000 U.S. hospitals and found only 36% of them to be fully compliant with all requirements.
Although the majority of hospitals have posted files, the widescale noncompliance of 64% of hospitals is due to most hospitals’ files being incomplete or not having prices clearly associated with both payer and plan, the report says.
Of the 2,000 hospitals reviewed in the report, Patient Rights Advocate found the following:
- 36% were complying with the rule, leaving 64% of hospitals in noncompliance
- 3.5% did not post a usable standard charges file
- 61.4% of hospitals posted negotiated prices clearly associated with payers and plans, but 41.3% still failed compliance because their pricing data was missing or significantly incomplete
The report says that compliance varied widely among the largest hospital systems it reviewed.
When it comes to noncompliance, there were seven large health systems reviewed in the report that were listed as completely noncompliant with the law:
- Avera Health
- Baylor Scott & White Health
- HCA Healthcare
- Mercy
- Providence
- Tenet Healthcare
- UPMC
Consistent with its prior reports, none of the hospitals owned by HCA Healthcare were found to be in full compliance, with a significant amount of its hospitals posting illegible, nonconforming files, according to the report.
On the other hand, the report details substantial improvements since its last report including that 88% of hospitals owned by CommonSpirit Health, 97% of hospitals owned by Community Health Systems, and 98% of hospitals owned by Kaiser Permanente were found to be in full compliance.
The report also says that forty hospitals exhibited “backsliding,” with an assessment of “noncompliant” in the current report after having been assessed as “compliant” in prior reports.
Amanda Norris is the Director of Content for HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Of the 2,000 hospitals reviewed in the report, Patient Rights Advocate found only 36% were fully complying with the price transparency rule.
None of the hospitals owned by HCA Healthcare were found to be in full compliance with the law.