• Morgan A Henderson and Morgane C Mouslim.
• The Hilltop Institute, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Sondheim Hall, 3rd Floor, Baltimore, MD 21250. Email: mmouslim@hilltop.umbc.edu.
• Am J Manag Care. 2024 Aug 1; 30 (8): e247e250e247-e250.

AbstractGiven recent congressional interest in codifying price transparency regulations, it is important to understand the extent to which newly available price transparency data capture true underlying procedure-level prices. To that end, we compared the prices for maternity services negotiated between a large payer and 26 hospitals in Mississippi across 2 separate price transparency data sources: payer and hospital. The degree of file overlap is low, with only 16.3% of hospital-billing code observations appearing in both data sources. However, for the observations that overlap, pricing concordance is high: Corresponding prices have a correlation coefficient of 0.975, 77.4% match to the penny, and 84.4% are within 10%. Exact price matching rates are greater than 90% for 3 of the 4 service lines included in this study. Taken together, these results suggest that although administrative misalignment exists between payers and hospitals, there is a measure of signal amid the price transparency noise.

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