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 Today in Health it, the story is how two thirds of the largest hospitals aren't complying with the price transparency rule. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. I. And engaged, no sponsor today, but wanted to make you aware of the fact that we have redone our website.

In fact, we're in the process of redoing our website. You may go out there and find some broken links and some things, uh, going on right now, but when we are done, it is gonna be a great resource for you and your team to stay current on the things that are going on in health it. We're also going to pull out some of the quotes from our shows, start to showcase those as well as some other things.

So check that out this week, health.com. All right, here's today's story. This is from Modern Healthcare. Two thirds of the largest hospitals aren't complying with the price transparency rule. I'm not sure this is a shock to anyone. CMS Compi compelled hospitals January 1st to publish machine readable files with rates.

They negotiated, negotiated rates, machine readable out on their website, able to be downloaded, uh, by the general public and researchers and others who are gonna do that. And that's essentially where this . Information came from more than 50 hospitals, either did not include their payer specific negotiated rates with the name of the payer and plan, or were non-compliant in some other way.

A dozen did not post any files and provided links to searchable database that were not down downloadable. Uh, the two. People who did this, Morgan Henderson, Morgan Muslim, a policy analyst at Hilltop set out to parse and analyze the pricing data as many others have started to try to do. But they soon learned that the more pressing question was, if the data was available.

They go on to say that they were surprised. They expect some lumps and bumps as they as with any new regulation, but they did not anticipate that a majority would not . Provide good enough information for them to do the research that we're trying to do. About 22 hospitals in the sample seem to be compliant, and 13, clearly exceeding the regulations.

The researchers added noting that hospitals are under strain with C Ovid 19, and that complying with this regulation may be, uh, especially costly. And challenging during this period, the transparency rule, bolsters prior regulations, so forth, it goes on and talks about these various things. This is actually gonna be a pretty short episode.

I'm just gonna go right into the so what, so what for this episode is, this is not about the task of putting this information together. It's not about the technology. It's not about enabling the innovation community. This is about a reputation that you will have in the community of . Being either transparent with your pricing or being opaque with your pricing, and one is clearly on the side of the consumer, one is not on the side of the consumer.

This is not a strategy. I think that you really want to go down a path. You really want to go down. Right now you have new entrants coming into the market. These new entrants are . Coming up with services that are very clearly priced, very easy to access via digital means, and that is where the competition's gonna be coming from.

That's where the competition is going. And this is one of those areas where a health system could benefit greatly by not only adhering to this rule, but . Going beyond this rule and figuring out a way to really help the community that you serve with pricing, with understanding what your costs are, with eliminating the surprise bills.

There's so many ways that this benefits the health system. And I don't think it is all that hard from a technology perspective. Essentially, it's a spreadsheet with the services. Now, I understand the complexity of the charge master and all the things that are associated with that, but again, I, this is not rocket science.

We have done really hard things in healthcare. This is not one of them. So my hope is that. The health systems, whether this administration decides to come down on the people who are non-compliant, the health systems that are non-compliant or not, my hope is that health systems will choose to do this based on.

The need to be consumer centric and the need to get out in front of this. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture.

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