Description

Market development around transparency in the cost of billable outpatient medical services is heating up in 2014, with the Health Care Cost Institute recently announcing a voluntary agreement with the three largest insurers in the US to publish standard charge rates across most CPT assigned services. Price transparency provides the benchmark by which healthcare service enters the retail price-competitive world and continues to evolve into a robust platform with improved quality and analytics measures. However, it has been dogged in recent years by a few factors that limit availability and relevance of published information. The following article discusses major issues in this area, as well as a market analysis.