Whopping statistics show how quickly payers responded to the price transparency rule this year, compared to hospitals.
When it comes to price transparency rules, the hospital regulation has been in place four times longer than the payer version, yet the difference in the data available for the two is miles apart.
More specifically, enough miles that it would be the equivalent of traveling from Earth to Neptune and back 14 times, according to Turquoise Health. The price transparency data company put together numbers that illustrate how much payer pricing information is out there in its 2022 year in review.
Since the hospital price transparency rule went into effect on January 1, 2021, Turquoise Health has collected about three terabytes of hospital data. That figure pales in comparison to the 630 terabytes of payer data since the payer rule arrived on the scene July 1, 2022. If you're calculating at home, that's a gargantuan 20,090% increase in size from the hospital data.
Those 630 terabytes consist of 78 billion payer price records, with 163 total number of payers in Turquoise Health's database. If you decided to manually count the rows of data after payers refresh their data monthly, the company says it would take a mind-boggling 76,104 decades.
Despite the size of all that data, payers haven't yet figured out the best way to display it for consumers. Turquoise Health found payer machine-readable files that varied 50-100 times in size.
"The takeaway: payers can drastically reduce their file sizes by taking measures to ensure smart architecture," Turquoise Health said. "For example, using references to provider groups within rates, as opposed to duplicating the provider group data within each rate shrinks the overall file sizes."
Jay Asser is the contributing editor for strategy at HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Turquoise Health's 2022 Price Transparency Data Year in Review details how quickly payers provided pricing information after the rule went into effect in July.
Payer data accounts for 630 terabytes, which significantly outpaces the three terabytes of hospital data.
However, bigger isn't always better as payers still need to trim down their machine-readable files to be more consumer-friendly.