Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, is the co-author of a new JAMA: Internal Medicine research article titled Comparison of Hospital Online Price and Telephone Price for Shoppable Services. In the article, Henderson—and co-authors Dr. Peter Cram, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), UTMB medical students Merina Thomas and James Flaherty, Dr. Jiefei Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics & Data Sciences at UTMB, Dr. Vivian Ho from The Baker Institute at Rice University, and Mark Cuban of Mark Cuban Companies—present findings of a study of the validity of hospitals’ publicly posted price transparency data. In the study, the research team contacted 60 hospitals across 20 geographic areas of the country using simulated “secret shopper” patients and obtained telephonic pricing estimates for childbirth and brain MRIs. The research team compared these telephonic pricing estimates to price transparency data obtained from hospital websites to determine the concordance of the two sets of price estimates and found that there was poor correlation between telephonic prices and Internet prices.
This research is among the first to assess whether newly available hospital price transparency data accurately captures true, underlying prices, and contributes to the national policy conversation about price transparency and hospital accountability.
Read more about Hilltop’s work on price transparency here.
Read the article.
For media inquiries, contact Marsha Willis.
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