The Wisconsin Hospital Association is denouncing as “flawed” a new report from an advocacy group that found just 61% of the hospitals it assessed in Wisconsin are fully complying with federal price transparency rules.
The nonprofit PatientRightsAdvocate.org last week issued its eighth Hospital Price Transparency Compliance Report, which assessed 2,000 hospitals across the country.
It found 49.4% of these hospitals were in full compliance with federal hospital price transparency rules, noting that’s the highest level the report has found. Prior reports that looked at the same number of hospitals ranged from 16% to 34.5%.
“However, hospitals continue to post incalculable algorithms and percentages, in lieu of actual, dollar-and-cents prices, leaving patients in the dark,” authors wrote.
The report looked at 46 hospitals in Wisconsin, finding 28 were compliant and 18 were noncompliant, while 24 had “sufficient” pricing data available. Its assessment is based in part on a federal rule that took effect in 2021, requiring hospitals to publicly post prices in machine-readable formats as well as consumer-friendly information for common services.
But when asked for comment on the nonprofit’s findings, WHA President Kyle O’Brien said the group found “multiple errors” with the group’s report within minutes.
“This has been a trend with PRA, releasing outdated and incorrect data to paint hospitals in a bad light,” O’Brien said in a statement.
Along with the fact that the report looked at just one-third of hospitals in the state, WHA pointed to several other issues with the report’s findings, including information contradicting its claims that SSM St. Agnes in Fond du Lac and Watertown Regional Medical Center don’t pass a file validator tool from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
At the same time, report authors claimed two of 14 Aurora hospitals had incorrect header templates for their files, despite the health system using the same header template for all of its hospital files.
Meanwhile, multiple Wisconsin hospitals included in the study pass every transparency measure included in the report except for the nonprofit’s own “Pricing Data Sufficiency” metric. The group says this measure assesses the completeness of posted pricing data, including if the hospital posted payer-specific negotiated charges in dollars and cents for at least half of the items and services identified.
Despite the group’s findings, O’Brien notes no Wisconsin hospital has been fined for noncompliance by federal regulators who have conducted more than 13,000 reviews of hospital files across the country.
