VitalWare(TM) Introduces HospitalPriceIndex.com In Response To Governmental Pricing Transparency Mandate
YAKIMA, Wash., Dec. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- VitalWare, a leading provider of revenue cycle SaaS solutions, today introduced HospitalPriceIndex.com, a patient-friendly, online tool that provides a strategic and meaningful way to adhere to the imminent government mandate for posting standard hospital prices.
On January 1, 2019, CMS will require all hospitals to make public a list of their standard charges, allowing the public to view a patient-friendly list of all hospital charges. Updated annually, CMS is requiring all hospitals to provide this information in a machine-readable format that can be easily be read by a human, and/or processed by a computer.
In response to this mandate, VitalWare has developed HospitalPriceIndex.com. It is designed to be a useful tool for both patients and providers to increase transparency and provide context, reducing confusion around the meaning of different health care costs and increasing patient consumer confidence in procedure-based pricing.
Kerry Martin, President and CEO of VitalWare, comments, "We're excited to launch HospitalPriceIndex.com (HPIC) to help hospitals meet the pending 2019 governmental pricing transparency mandate. HPIC will not only meet the new regulation for hospitals, but will mitigate potential risk for them. We believe posting full chargemasters online may open the door for consumer and media scrutiny. The risk lies in the chargemaster descriptions that often include trademark and model numbers which are easily searchable online, providing wholesale cost information that doesn't reflect the complexity of care one will receive." Kerry continues, "hospital charging practices are multifaceted, not consumer-friendly, and could be easily misinterpreted by patients who want to understand their out-of-pocket expenses. Knowing the price for each individual supply or procedure is irrelevant for most healthcare consumers, therefore posting a full chargemaster is not the answer. Hospitals must have a proven, consistent strategy for posting standard hospital charges online in order to remain unscathed from this mandate, and HPIC is a solution to help our hospital clients meet it."
Tracey Talley, Chief Financial Officer at Kalispell Regional Medical Center commented, "VitalWare is known to be a leader in innovation and developing cutting-edge healthcare solutions. With the introduction of hospitalpriceindex.com, this magnifies their focus and extraordinary expertise in their ability to create and scale their solutions and intelligence to meet the needs of hospitals and healthcare consumers alike."
About VitalWare
VitalWare is the leading mid-revenue cycle SaaS solutions provider, specializing in Health-IT applications aimed at making the business of healthcare easier through its intuitive cloud-based technologies and regulatory content expertise. With more than 675 hospitals on its client roster, VitalWare's product portfolio is the healthcare industry's best solution for providing visibility and continuity in Chargemaster management, documentation, charge capture, and regulatory code references. Beyond providing tools and healthcare regulatory and compliance resources, VitalWare offers professional services designed to support organizations' need of coding guidance, process improvement, education and financial impact solutions. Visit our website, http://www.vitalware.com
SOURCE VitalWare
