Did you know that, effective January 1, 2019, hospitals have a new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) mandate to which they must comply?
According to section 2718(e) of the Public Health Service Act under the ACA, all hospitals in the U.S. must post a listing of their current standard charges on their hospital website. This information must be:
- Updated at least on an annual basis, or more often as appropriate;
- In the form of the chargemaster or another form of the hospital’s choice;
- In a machine readable format such as xml or csv. A pdf version would not comply as it cannot be easily imported into a computer system.
While the file format used is the hospital’s choice, the file must be in a machine readable format and represent the hospital’s current standard charges for all items and services provided by the hospital.
While CMS encourages state price transparency initiatives, participation in an online state price transparency initiative does not exempt a hospital from this new mandate.
For more information about this new mandate, please visit the CMS Fact Sheet.
Need help?
Please contact Practis. We understand that healthcare compliance and digital updates can be hard to follow, but it’s something our team loves! Let us take care of the heavy lifting for you so you can continue to make your hospital great.