In the past, we’ve highlighted some of the advantages of publishing pricing data as required by the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Rule: improving customer loyalty by making transactions easier, staying competitive, and increasing negotiating power with payers.
But to realize the latter two, hospitals must also know what their competitors’ prices are – and when those prices change. The easiest way to keep track of your competitors’ price transparency files? Let us help.
Here’s a look at how we make it happen – and how staying abreast of your competitors’ prices can benefit your bottom line.
Not sure how compliant your hospital is? Find out with our compliance search engine.
Get Notified When New Prices Post
At HDA, we’re committed to improving price transparency by making hospital pricing data easier to access, analyze, and engage with. We do that by collecting, cleaning, monitoring, standardizing, aggregating, and reporting the pricing data hospitals publish. This means we’re among the first to know when a hospital updates its price transparency file – or publishes its file for the first time.
In addition to providing our customers access to the pricing data itself and our customized Google Looker-powered analytics layer that facilitates easy analysis of the data, we can also provide insights and updates about the data – including when a competitor posts a new pricing file.
Knowing when these updates happen offers two major benefits to hospitals.
Benefit 1: Leverage Your First-Mover Advantage
At a recent conference for ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), one industry leader encouraged ASCs to comply with new price transparency requirements as a way to differentiate themselves in the market and build goodwill among patients.
It’s advice that can benefit hospitals as well: with price transparency compliance rates still low in most of the country, many hospitals still have the opportunity to differentiate via transparency. Key to making this work, though, is knowing when and whether your competitors post their prices and to what extent they’ve complied with CMS guidelines.
Even when everyone in your marketplace is compliant, though (and we have to assume that all hospitals will eventually be compliant), there’s opportunity in being the first (or best) to message around transparency.
Today, many hospitals seem to be taking the approach of ignoring price transparency requirements or burying their price transparency files so that they’re difficult to find. A hospital that markets its radical price transparency could win new patients simply because American healthcare consumers are so fed up with the lack of transparency in pricing, as evidenced by new legislation prohibiting surprise medical bills.
Benefit 2: Understand How Patient Expectations Are Changing
Given what we know about current compliance rates, the odds are good that, as you read this, your hospital is not fully compliant with CMS’s Hospital Price Transparency Rule. Today, most patients don’t expect prices for hospitals’ shoppable services to be readily available, simply because they never have been.
But those expectations could soon change.
Popular wisdom in the world of software, for example, holds that the best experiences customers have shape their expectations for the interactions they have with all brands. The same will hold true in healthcare: as more and more hospitals deliver on price transparency, patients will come to expect – and demand – that transparency.
Knowing when your competitors publish (or update) their pricing files will help you understand what the norm is for the people you serve. When the opportunity to leverage a first-mover advantage has passed, this information will help you understand what you have to do to keep from losing patients to competitors offering a better, more transparent experience.
Enjoy the Full Benefits of Price Transparency with HDA
As CMS has noted, increased price transparency has the potential to drive innovation and improve outcomes throughout the healthcare system. At HDA, we’re committed to helping further transparency by making critical competitive pricing data more usable to the entities that can most benefit from using it.
If you’re interested in learning when your competitors publish their prices – or in otherwise gaining access to pricing data for the hospitals you compete with – get in touch.