Hilltop Announces the Price Transparency State Profiles, a New Free Public Resource

Abstract

The Hilltop Institute is proud to introduce the Price Transparency State Profiles, an innovative public resource offering centralized access to hospital pricing data as well as links to state laws on hospital price transparency. In response to the Hospital Price Transparency Rule, enacted as of January 1, 2021, requiring hospitals to disclose machine-readable data files of standard charges on their websites, Hilltop’s initiative aims to make hospital pricing data more accessible and user-friendly to researchers, policymakers, and the public.

Recognizing the lack of standardized data formats specified by the regulation, and with funding from the National Science Foundation, Hilltop is collecting, processing, and publishing data from hundreds of hospitals across the United States. To date, the Price Transparency State Profiles encompass data from 11 states, with ongoing efforts to expand coverage across the entire country. To enhance cross-hospital research, the collected data undergoes a transformation into a common data model.

The Price Transparency State Profiles are the centerpiece of Hilltop’s new area of work in price transparency. Hilltop researchers have been analyzing the data to study a variety of issues, including affordability of emergency services for self-pay patients, cross-hospital price variation, and trends in hospital prices over time. Each state’s profile can be accessed through an interactive map that shows which states have data, which states have laws, and which states have both.