Hospitals post prices online

Last year, CMS (Medicare) mandated that hospitals would be required to post prices of procedures online. Kaiser Health News reported on some of the problems in using this information. One of the problems is that the procedure names are difficult to understand and not very helpful outside the medical billing industry. Another problem is that procedures are not grouped, and many procedures often require other costs (for example, surgery often involves a separate anesthesia component along with a facility fee); hence, patients do not really know how much a visit (with all of the related charges) at the hospital will actually cost.

Despite these problems, it is positive that hospitals are required to publicly post prices. Perhaps this is just one step in a much longer movement towards transparency. As a technology company in this space, we certainly appreciate the mandate that the information is in a machine-readable format.