HCA expands price transparency

The national hospital network plans to post prices for all its facilities.

By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. March 26, 2007.

More potential HCA Inc. patients will be able to check prices in advance of treatment as the network expands its price transparency initiative to include all of its 183 hospitals by mid-summer. The initiative began in the for-profit chain's Dallas market in October 2006.

Each of HCA's hospitals will have a link on its Web site detailing the program and how to obtain information in both English and Spanish. Uninsured patients can obtain a list of prices for the top 22 procedures. Insured patients can call HCA to get insurer-specific information detailing an estimate of out-of-pocket expenses.

HCA spokesman Ed Fishbough said if an insured patient has all the necessary information, which is detailed on the Web site, the call can take less than 10 minutes.

From October 2006 through February 2007, more than 2,300 unique visitors went to HCA's pricing Web site, and 209 calls have been made to obtain information. Fishbough said the calls were about evenly split between those from uninsured and insured patients. The largest number of requests concerned maternity services, he said.

HCA's efforts came in response to President Bush's launching of a national price transparency initiative last spring. Also as part of that initiative, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in November 2006 posted online pricing information for selected services performed in physician offices and outpatient departments of hospitals. Medicare posted similar data for inpatient hospitals last June and ambulatory surgical centers last August.