On June 24^th, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to lower healthcare costs through improved price transparency. The focus of the order is to provide patients access to pricing information for scheduled services and the out-of-pocket costs they may incur. It aims to eliminate barriers to price and quality transparency, to increase the availability of meaningful price and quality information for patients and to enhance patients’ control over their own healthcare resources.

When does this happen?

• Within 60 days the Secretary of Health and Human Services is to propose a regulation to require hospitals to publicly post standard charge information and negotiated rates for common or shoppable services in a consumer-friendly and machine-readable format
• Within 90 days an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking shall be made available for comment on the proposal
• Within 180 days a report is to be issued describing the manners in which the Federal Government or the private sector are impeding healthcare price and quality transparency for patients, and providing recommendations for eliminating these impediments in a way that promotes competition

How can Cleverley + Associates Help?

We’ve worked with providers to strategically develop their pricing strategy and make it accessible and understandable to the public for many years. 

We have extensive pricing databases and reports that summarize data by inpatient and outpatient cases and are able to identify the high-spending categories for both. We recently improved our Transparency Fifty report, that identifies comparative pricing for the top shoppable outpatient services by HCPCS code where hospitals and free-standing entities compete.

In addition, our MS-DRG profile report identifies the top inpatient services and our APC Charge profile report identifies the top outpatient visits grouped by a primary APC. 

We’ll keep you posted as additional information becomes available. You can also review our Transparency Continuum here. We’re beginning to see some of the patient expectations and requests we predicted.

While the exact nature of what will be required is yet to be determined, we are confident that Cleverley + Associates has the resources and experience that can help hospitals prepare for this next wave of price transparency. Give us a call at 888.779.5663 or email us here!