The Affordable Care Act (ACA) included a requirement for hospitals nationwide to establish, update and make public a list of their standard charges for all items and services provided to patients, including for Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG). This information is to be made available each year.
The 2019 IPPS final rule, effective January 1, 2019, revised this requirement to require the chargemaster information to be made available to the public via the internet in “machine-readable” format. A machine-readable format is one that can be automatically read and processed by a computer, such as CSV, XML, etc. PDF and Word documents are not considered machine readable, nor are most Microsoft Excel files. DRG information must be available to patients upon request, but does not need to be online.
McLaren Health Care and its subsidiary hospitals throughout Michigan are committed to increased transparency around healthcare costs, including price information for consumers.
Patients are encouraged to use out-of-pocket cost, quality and patient safety information together to make an informed healthcare purchasing decision. Hospital-specific quality and patient safety information is publicly available at www.verifymicare.org.