Happy New Year!
CMS announced in the most recent final IPPS rule that as of January 1, 2019, all hospitals must post their standard charges on the internet in machine-readable format, to increase transparency in pricing. They have also published some FAQs related to the rule. (reference)
Hospitals have started to publish their charges, online in a variety of formats. Here are some tips on publishing your chargemasters.
- Always include an explanation for your patients. Explain what a chargemaster is used for and how their financial responsibility can be affected by their insurance, co-pays and deductibles and discounts. Explain what a DRG is, and who pays according to DRG assignments.
- Include a notice of the effective date of the charges and how often they will be updated.
- Use machine-readable formats such as xls or csv style spreadsheets for easy downloading.
- Use patient friendly descriptions whenever possible on the line item charges.
- Post your DRG average charges with a clear description of each DRG.
- You can include CPT codes if desired to help patients identify the same charges in other chargemasters.
Here are some examples of formats we have seen posted so far this year:
Notice the list below does not include descriptions:
This one includes the charge number:
Some spreadsheets include both chargemaster and DRG amounts:
Some hospitals have made it difficult to find their online list of charges while some have made the list easy to find. You can decide what information you would like to post, where you want it located, and the format for download.
If you have any questions, please contact Sandy Sage, RN at [email protected]