Improving Measurement of Commercial Hospital Prices to Facilitate Employer and State Policy Action

This project aims to validate Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) price transparency data and document variation in commercial hospital prices. The research team will search for and scrape hospital price transparency data from approximately 4,500 hospital webpages and harmonize the data across institutions in order to measure hospital compliance with the CMS price-reporting requirements. The researchers will then validate the hospital-reported price data by comparing it with claims from the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) database. The project will then examine variation in commercial hospital prices across insurers nationally, within market areas, within providers, and by level of hospital and insurer market concentration.