format that includes additional information such as common billing or
accounting codes used by the hospital, so as to provide a common
framework for comparing standard charges from hospital to hospital;
and
• make public payer-specific negotiated charges for common shop-
pable services available in a consumer-friendly manner.
As can be expected, consumer advocates applaud the notion of
transparency in healthcare pricing. Hospitals, providers and payers, on
the other hand, generally treat their negotiated rates as highly secure
trade secrets. After all, once competitors know what rates a facility or
medical group would accept, or can be had from a particular payer, the
entity's competitive edge is instantly dulled.
What are you looking at?
But there's another way to use the push toward healthcare trans-
parency: as a tool for your facility's internal improvement.
There's transparency and then there's transparency. We all know
what it's like to drive on a foggy night. Sure, the windshield is clean
and the glass is completely transparent. But what we see is, well,
mostly nothing. Just as looking from the driver's seat through the
transparent windshield and seeing only fog is disorienting, that is,
uninformative, so, too, is looking into a car's windshield when it's cov-
ered with frost — all you see is a white haze. In a similar manner, you
can't understand your internal data if it, too, is mired in opaqueness.
Consider the challenges hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs)
and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) face in providing accurate
cost-per-case data:
For HOPDs:
• Computer systems within the hospital might not interface with
each other, or, if they do, don't do so in real time;
Regulatory Affairs
RA
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