Is your hospital ready for the 2024 price transparency mandate? Use our checklist to prepare.
Hospitals face multiple price transparency deadlines for the coming year that will bring new, stricter requirements and stepped-up compliance enforcement measures. As part of The Craneware Group’s commitment to helping our hospital and health system stakeholders, we offer a handy checklist below to help your teams make sure you’re prepared.
The new Jan. 1, 2024 requirements are outlined in Medicare’s 2024 Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) final rule. Price transparency itself is part of the government’s efforts to promote a “patient-driven” healthcare system and goes back to 2021, when CMS began requiring hospitals to post their standard charges via machine-readable files (MRF) and a consumer-friendly display of at least 300 shoppable services.
Starting Jan. 1, 2024, hospitals must demonstrate a “good faith effort” that the standard charges in the MRF are “true, accurate, and complete.” They must also ensure that links to the MRF appear in a .txt file in the hospital’s root folder and in a footer on the hospital website’s homepage.
This is likely in response to CMS having a hard time finding MRFs on hospital websites. By automating it with .txt files, it will be much more helpful for the researchers and payors to retrieve these files. CMS has been clear that the intention of the MRFs is not to help patients looking for pricing information — that’s the role of price estimator tools and shoppable services lists — but to stimulate market competition. So, you should understand that data will be collected by many entities, especially health plans who may use it to negotiate for lower reimbursement rates with hospitals. Read more >
