Legislators have ruled in favor of a new federal law stating every hospital in the United States is required to publish prices for treatments online in efforts to move toward hospital price transparency.
What does Hospital Price Transparency mean for Your Business?
What Is the Hospital Price Transparency Law?
The law, also known as the Inpatient Prospective Payment, states that hospitals are required to post a list of their standard pricing online and make electronic medical records more available to patients.
The current requirements apply to all items and services provided by the hospital. According to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the new rule is aimed to allow consumers to make informed decisions and create competition in the healthcare market, which would drive down prices.
The prices must be displayed online in a format that can be downloaded to computers and must be updated annually.
CMS’s policy changes include:
• Requiring hospitals to post their standard list of prices on the internet and in a machine-readable format, rather than just being required to make them available in some form
• Focusing the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program on promoting interoperability, to allow patients to control their records and access them in a usable format
• Eliminating duplicative, overly burdensome or out-of-date quality measures through the “Meaningful Measures” initiative
Who is Affected by the Hospital Price Transparency Law?
It’s meant for Medicare patients and providers, but CMS hopes that hospitals across the country will acquire this practice for all services.
While the law doesn’t yet apply to private practices and stand-alone urgent care centers, there is no knowing if it will expand to them in the near future.
The new rule of hospital price transparency aims to give consumers easy access to prices, although the exact final price may be different due to differences in insurer and government rates.
The secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Alex Azar, released a statement saying,
“This payment proposal takes important steps toward a Medicare system that puts patients in charge of their care and allows them to receive the quality and price information needed to drive competition and increase value.”
Rising deductibles are causing hospitals to find creative ways to collect customer payments.
How Your Company Can Prepare for the Hospital Price Transparency Law
The implementation of the new law means new challenges for healthcare providers, one of them being rebranding hospital websites to include care cost information. Rising deductibles are making hospitals to find creative ways to collect customer payments.
One of the easiest things your company can do to combat these changes is by ensuring your business has the cash flow needed to fund this rebranding.
That is where factoring medical invoices come in.
Get the funding needed to pay for website development, marketing projects and nurse salaries by contacting PRN Funding.
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