The Wisconsin Hospital Association is pushing back against a new national report that claims a portion of Wisconsin hospitals are failing to comply with Federal Price Transparency laws.
The PatientRightsAdvocate.org released its Hospital Price Transparency Compliance Report in September, which reviews 2,000 hospitals across the United States. The organization found that 49.4% of hospitals were fully compliant with federal price transparency requirements, the highest compliance rate recorded from its previous reports. (RELATED:New Report Challenges Wisconsin’s “Brain Drain” Narrative)
Wisconsin hospitals performed better than the national average. The organization examined 46 Wisconsin Hospitals and classified 28, or roughly 61%, as compliant. Eighteen hospitals were labeled as noncompliant, while only 24 were found to have what the organization labels as “sufficient” pricing data.
The Wisconsin Hospital Association President Kyle O’Brien is fighting against those findings, saying the WHA identified multiple problems with the report shortly after reviewing it. “This has been a trend with PRA, releasing outdated and incorrect data to paint hospitals in a bad light,” O’Brien told WisBusiness.
The WHA says that the report only analyzed 46 Wisconsin hospitals, which they say only examines about a third of the state’s total. They also argue that there are inconsistencies involving individual hospitals. The WHA feels that this is not only too small of a sample size, but that the inconsistencies with reporting make this publishing invalid.
Patient Rights Advocate reported that SSM Health St. Agnes Hospital in Fond du Lac and Watertown Regional Medical Center failed a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services file validator. WHA says information from the federal validator contradicts those findings. The organization also questioned why two of 14 Aurora hospitals were cited for incorrect file-header templates when the health system uses the same header template across its hospital files. (RELATED: Mexican Citizen Charged With Illegally Voting in Wisconsin Election)
Under CMS hospital price transparency requirements, hospitals must make pricing information publicly available through a comprehensive machine-readable file and provide consumer-friendly pricing information for at least 300 “shoppable” services, or as many as the hospital provides if fewer than 300 are available.
Patient Rights Advocate goes further by applying its own “Pricing Data Sufficiency” assessment. The organization evaluates whether hospitals provide payer-specific negotiated prices in dollars and cents for at least half of the identified items and services. Several Wisconsin hospitals passed the other transparency measures reviewed but failed this additional sufficiency test.
