Digital Financial Reporting

A law was passed last year in the United States that requires every hospital in the US to provide a publically available list of their standard charges for services that they provide in a machine-readable file.  There are two sections that elaborate on these requirements:

SUMMARY

This final rule establishes requirements for hospitals operating in the United States to establish, update, and make public a list of their standard charges for the items and services that they provide. These actions are necessary to promote price transparency in health care and public access to hospital standard charges. By disclosing hospital standard charges, we believe the public (including patients, employers, clinicians, and other third parties) will have the information necessary to make more informed decisions about their care. We believe the impact of these final policies will help to increase market competition, and ultimately drive down the cost of health care services, making them more affordable for all patients.

Section E. Requirements for Public Disclosure of All Hospital Standard Charges for All Items and Services in a Comprehensive Machine-Readable File 1. OVERVIEW:

For purposes of displaying all standard charges for all items and services in a comprehensive machine-readable file, we proposed requirements for the file format, the content of the data in the file, and how to ensure the public could easily access and find the file.

Here is a good interpretation and explanation of the regulation.  Here is information related to implementing the rule. Here is general information about the CMS.

The regulation does not specify specifically what syntax should be used or the specific semantics of what is actually provided.  Currently, from what I have seen each of the approximately 6,000 hospitals in the United States uses whatever syntax they want and makes available whatever information they want using names and labels they make up.

An alternative is to use off-the-shelf XBRL software.  I created this working prototype to help examine what XBRL can provide.  You can do this using raw XBRL or Inline XBRL.  I provided a simple version of both.  I used XBRL Dimensions to work with the information in the form of a pivot table.

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Price Transparency and Variability in U.S. Health Services