US healthcare price transparency
How TreatCompare Uses US Hospital Price Transparency Data
TreatCompare translates hospital price transparency fields into consumer decision pages. The goal is to help people ask better questions before booking care, not to pretend a published hospital price is the same as a final patient bill.
Using this data?
Methodology, extracts and licensing
Main sources
- CMS Hospital Price Transparency overview
- CMS Hospital Price Transparency hospitals page
- CMSgov/hospital-price-transparency GitHub repository
- CMS CSV and JSON machine-readable file template guidance
Methodology: This methodology explains how TreatCompare maps source-native hospital price transparency fields into consumer-facing price and decision records. It is not a full hospital-price ingestion report.
TreatCompare publishes healthcare, care-cost and treatment-pricing research for consumers, journalists, policymakers and commercial teams.
Core fields
| Term | Meaning | How consumers should use it |
|---|---|---|
| Machine-readable file | A hospital-posted digital file containing standard charges for all items and services provided by the hospital. | Useful for structured comparison, but often too technical for a patient to use without normalisation. |
| Consumer-friendly shoppable services | A display of shoppable services that a consumer can schedule in advance, including ancillary services where applicable. | Usually easier to read than a full MRF, but may still omit patient-specific deductible and network effects. |
| Gross charge | The chargemaster list price before discounts, contracts or patient-specific calculations. | Rarely the best estimate of what a self-pay or insured patient will actually owe. |
| Discounted cash price | The hospital charge that applies to a patient paying cash or cash equivalent. | The starting point for self-pay comparison, but it may not include every professional, facility or ancillary bill. |
| Payer-specific negotiated charge | The charge a hospital has negotiated with a specific third-party payer and plan. | A useful insurance-route input, but not the same as patient responsibility after deductible, copay and coinsurance. |
| De-identified minimum and maximum negotiated charges | The lowest and highest negotiated charges across payers, without identifying the payer. | Useful for range context, but not enough to know what a specific plan or patient will pay. |
How TreatCompare labels records
- Source type: CMS hospital MRF, shoppable-service file, provider cash page, manual research or third-party dataset.
- Price type: gross charge, discounted cash price, payer-specific negotiated charge, de-identified min/max or self-pay advertised.
- Confidence: high, medium or low, based on source clarity and matching quality.
- Inclusions: facility fee, professional fee, contrast, bundled estimate and derived-estimate flags where known.
- Dates: source last checked, retrieval time, MRF date and CMS template version where available.
What TreatCompare does not infer
- We do not turn a hospital negotiated charge into a final bill without plan inputs.
- We do not combine facility and professional fees unless the source supports a bundled estimate.
- We do not publish placeholder prices as real provider data.
- We do not say cash is always cheaper.
- We do not give medical, legal, billing or insurance advice.
Submission and correction standard
Patient-submitted and provider-submitted prices can be useful, but they should not be mixed with independently sourced rows until they have a source label, checked date, confidence rating and clear inclusion/exclusion notes.