This work was done with help of Dr. Jaan Altosaar at One Fact Foundation. You can reach him at jaan@onefact.org.
We just built a data bank of hospital price lists: lists that are supposed to contain all of a hospital’s prices. To our knowledge, this doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s free to use under Creative Commons. You can jump straight to the database, look at our compliance analysis on Github or Google CoLab, or read on for more context.
Background
Since 2019, hospitals, by law, have had to post a machine-readable price list with all the procedures they offer. The idea was to create a set of files with the same basic information: generic codes for labeling procedures, and prices indicating who pays. This data bank would, in theory, give you a way to price shop. This didn’t exist before, because before 2019 hospitals could legally their prices secret.
In the three years since, disclosure of these price lists has been hit and miss. Some hospitals posted partial price lists, others none at all. (They were probably counting on not getting caught.) Two hospitals fined over $1M combined in 2021 for refusing to host these files (but since the penalty, have since taken a U-turn and published their prices.) This might have been to send a message to the other hospitals to get serious.
So, in 2022, do hospitals actually publish their price lists? To know that, we’d have to scour the webpages over over 7,000 hospitals in the US. Then we could figure out what fraction meet the compliance standards.
So that’s what we did.
We’re just about done building an open database of hospital price lists after launching a weekly data bounty with funds from One Fact and our own marketing budget. At the moment, it’s the only such open database that exists.
One Fact to feed these files into their artificial intelligence pipeline and figure out how much hospitals charge for different procedures to make price shopping easier through their platform, Payless.Health. The One Fact Foundation is a 501c(3) nonprofit.
But we can also use these URLs to get a quick check on how many hospitals are actually in compliance and reproduce some improve actual published research.
Calculated transparency scores for price lists. Many were mostly compliant, but a large number either didn’t contain the right information, or weren’t machine readable.
Above are the calculated “transparency scores” for a sample of the ~500 prices lists in our database. We can use this to point to hospitals that are out of compliance.
To skip straight to the code, click here to open a Google CoLab notebook with our results.
Checking hospital price list compliance
The legal requirements mandate the file to:
- exist, and be available on the hospital’s website
- be machine-readable (i.e. not .pdfs)
- follow a naming convention:
EIN_hospitalname_standardcharges[.xlsx|.json|.csv] - contain some basic information (cash prices,
