Hospitals Need to Post Their Negotiated Prices in Less Than Six Short Weeks

Barring an appeals court decision overturning the rule, the mandate goes into effect on January 1, 2021.

The final rule will require hospitals to make their standard charges public in two ways beginning in 2021:

First, they must be available in a comprehensive machine-readable file. Hospitals will be required to make public all hospital standard charges for all items and services (including the gross charges, payer-specific negotiated charges, the amount the hospital is willing to accept in cash from a patient and the minimum and maximum negotiated charges) on the Internet in a single data file that can be read by other computer systems.

The file must include additional information, such as common billing or accounting codes used by the hospital (such as the Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System codes) and a description of the item or service, in order to provide common elements for consumers to compare standard charges from hospital to hospital.

Secondly, hospitals must display shoppable services in a consumer-friendly manner. They will be required to make public payer-specific negotiated charges, the amount the hospital is willing to accept in cash from a patient for an item or service, and the minimum and maximum negotiated charges for 300 common shoppable services in a manner that is consumer-friendly and update the information at least annually.

Hospitals will need to do more than post their chargemaster prices, which they are already doing under a previous rule that went into effect on January 1, 2019.

Source: https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-need-post-their-negotiated-prices-less-six-short-weeks