Northside Hospital scored the lowest, with 25 points out of 100 for data completeness and 2 points out of 100 for data accessibility.Back by popular demand are our multi-buy discount codes, the more you spend, the more you get off. The newspaper created a two-part grading system for data transparency and data completeness, and Northside scored lowest among the 14.Įmory Hospital Midtown scored the highest, with 100 points out of 100 for data completeness, and 93 points out of 100 for data accessibility. This week’s federal review of hospitals’ compliance with the rule echoed many of the findings made in the AJC’s review. The AJC found that none of the hospitals reviewed was yet perfectly in compliance. The AJC examined the public price lists posted, and looked at 10 factors determining whether they were as accessible and “shoppable” for consumers as the rule required. “If you are a hospital that is not competitive on price or quality, the best thing for you is for the patients not to know anything.”Īfter the federal government’s Hospital Price Transparency Rule had been in effect a few months, the AJC last year examined 14 Georgia hospitals’ compliance with the rule. “I mean, for many years, the hospitals have benefited from a lack of understanding from patients about where the cheapest offerings were,” Gelfand said. Gelfand, of the employers’ organization, said some hospitals probably just don’t want to comply. For Northside Hospital Cherokee, CMS said, “Specifically, no consumer-friendly list of standard charges was found.”Īs to the machine-readable file, CMS said this week that Northside’s didn’t include all required services, and the services weren’t included in one single file. The recent fine citation says Northside Hospital Atlanta didn’t have the searchable list for consumers posted in a prominent manner that clearly identified the location of the hospital concerned. Prices paid by patients can change depending on variables like insurance contract negotiations. Northside responded then that the information required by the federal government would not actually be useful to consumers because it lacked context. And the required consumer-friendly searchable list of certain services and their prices did not function when tested by AJC reporters. The AJC found that Northside had not posted a machine-readable list of prices as required. The federal citation and fines for Northside focused on the two areas of violation that the AJC reported on last year. Among all hospitals the AJC analyzed, Northside scored the lowest. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year examined Georgia hospitals’ compliance with the new federal rules, and gave each of the hospitals in the analysis a report card. Indeed, Georgia’s renowned academic hospital system, Emory Healthcare, had some price postings Thursday that led patients to a page empty except for one sentence: “You are not authorized to view this page.” JAMA authors found that nine months after the rule took effect, just over half of the hospitals it looked at, more than 2,000, still had not posted either a “machine-readable” price list - meaning the data can be read by a computer - or a searchable list for consumers, both required under the rule. The JAMA review also found that the hospitals less likely to comply were hospitals that made more money per patient. Metro Atlanta’s market is becoming increasingly concentrated, with five hospital systems owning all the area’s hospitals. It found that hospitals less likely to comply with the rule were those in more concentrated markets, with fewer independent hospitals and less competition. The medical journal JAMA this week published a review of hospital compliance with the rule, measured within the first 6 to 9 months after it took effect. It was contemptuous, right? One of (the two Northside hospitals) straight up said, ‘Oh, you want prices? You have to call.’” “It sounds like (Northside’s) behavior was beyond just failing to comply. “I mean, there’s no shortage of hospitals they could choose to go after,” Gelfand said. James Gelfand is senior vice president of health policy for the ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) Industry Committee, a Washington-D.C.-based nonprofit that represents some of the largest U.S. CMS said it had asked Northside Hospital Atlanta at least twice for a corrective action plan on how it was going to comply, but Northside had instead told CMS that patients should call or email the hospital for a personalized estimate. In citing Northside this week, CMS pointed to responses from the Northside Hospital system that seemed openly defiant of the rule.
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