The CMS Hospital Price Transparency Regulation (45 CFR §180.50) requires hospitals in the United States to disclose a public list of all standard charges for all items and services online and requires that this data must be a single digital file that is in a machine-readable format. This repository offers a suggested file format for the required machine-readable file that follows best-practices.
The file format format suggested here is based on the official payer price transparency file schemas maintained by CMS here: https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide
However, CMS does not yet provide a required file format or file schema for healthcare provider data. This repository is meant to expand on the official file formats maintained by CMS by extending them to cover the disclosure needs of healthcare providers.
Please note that Turquoise Health has created this file format as a suggestion and is not affiliated with CMS or any other governmental agency. We welcome the fantastic work that CMS is doing in price transparency and are posting this to provide feedback on how the rules may be clarified in the future.
This repository contains a schema describing a data format (example implementation is encoded as JSON) for the Transparency in Coverage final rule. All machine-readable files must conform to a non-proprietary, open standards format that is platform independent and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.
Starting January 1, 2021, hospitals in the United States are required to disclose a public list of all standard charges for all items and services in a single machine-readable file. This requirement extends to insurance plans and issuers on January 1, 2022.
While CMS requires a specific file format for insurance plan rate disclosure, no required file format was in place for the hospital rule. This repository offers a suggested file format to fill that gap.
All machine-readable files must be made available via HTTPS.
We suggest the following format to meet the needs for Transparency in Coverage:
However, equivalent data in a machine-convertable format would be acceptable:
Examples of proprietary formats that do not meet the requirements:
These machine-readable files must be made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.
The location of the these URLs must be provided over HTTPS to ensure the integrity of the data.
To allow for search engine discoverability, neither a robots.txt file nor meta tag on the page where the files are hosted will have rules such that give instructions to web crawlers to not index the page.
This is typically follows the format of <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> or for a robots.txt file using the Disallow directive.
Dates should be strings in ISO 8601 format (e.g. YYYY-MM-DD).
There is one flat file associated with hospital providers:
- Standard Charges
Standard Charges
Under the finalized rules, a hospital must disclose a public list of all standard charges for all items and services.
The following is the required naming standard for each file: <ein>_<hospitalname>_standardcharges.<file extension>
For hospital names that have spaces, those spaces would be replaced with dashes -
<ein>: Your Hospital’s Employer Identification Number<hospital-name>: Name of Your Hospital<standardcharges>: The textstandardcharges<file extension>: Your chosen file format, preferablyjson,