CMS Clarifies that Hospital and Insurer Pricing Transparency Disclosures Must be Accessible by Web Searches

Following a March 22 report by the Wall Street Journal that hospitals and insurers have skirted price transparency requirements by using special coding that shielded pricing data, including insurer rates, from online search engines, CMS issued a new guideline clarifying that the regulations require the data to be “easily accessible and void of barriers” and that digital files “be digitally searchable.” CMS issued the new guideline on March 23, 2020 in an online technical forum on GitHub, as reported by the Wall Street Journal on April 14.