• Alexandra Giantini-Larsen, Abhinav Pandey, Zaki Abou-Mrad, Nalini Tata, Ori Barzilai, Mark Bilsky, and W Christopher Newman.
• Department of Neurosurgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York, USA.
• Neurosurgery. 2024 Feb 12.

Background And ObjectivesThe Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services implemented federal requirements on January 1, 2021, under the Public Health Service Act that require hospitals to provide a list of payer-negotiated prices or "standard charges" in a machine-readable file and in a patient-friendly online estimator for standard services. We sought to assess compliance by United States hospitals associated with neurosurgical training programs with these federal requirements for 11 common neurosurgical procedures.MethodsWe performed a cross-sectional analysis in March 2023 of 116 United States hospitals associated with a neurosurgical training program to assess compliance with the new federal requirements to have a machine-readable, downloadable file with standard charges and a patient-friendly online estimator for two spinal procedures.ResultsA total of 110/114 (96.5%) hospitals were compliant with the requirement for a machine-readable file with payer-negotiated prices. A total of 47/110 hospitals (42.7%) were compliant with downloadable machine-readable files and reported at least one payer-negotiated price for 1 of the 11 common neurosurgical procedures. A total of 45/110 (40.9%) used bundled Diagnosis-Related Group codes, and 18/110 (16.4%) did not contain any price information for neurosurgical procedures. For neurosurgical procedures, the percent difference between the average negotiated private insurance and Medicare price per procedure ranged from 17.5% to 77.6%. Medicare and private insurance data for each procedure were available on average for 10.3 states (SD = 3.8) and 15.6 states (SD = 4.8), respectively.ConclusionWhile hospital compliance with federal requirements for machine-readable files with payer-negotiated prices was high, availability of payer-negotiated prices for 4 major insurance types across 11 common neurosurgical procedures based on Current Procedural Terminology codes was sparce. Consequently, meaningful conclusions on procedure-related charges for elective procedures are difficult for patients to make because of the unintelligible format of data and a lack of reporting of charges per Current Procedural Terminology code in a comprehensive manner.Copyright © Congress of Neurological Surgeons 2024. All rights reserved.

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