Round five of the Employer Hospital Price Transparency study,
conducted by RAND, creates the foundation for Sage
Transparency™ 2.0, the free, public dashboard on
nationwide hospital price and quality data
INDIANAPOLIS, May 13, 2024
/PRNewswire/ -- Employers' Forum of Indiana introduced Sage
Transparency™ 2.0, a major update to the free, publicly
accessible hospital price and quality dashboard, today at the
National Healthcare Price Transparency Conference in Indianapolis. Sage Transparency, which was
first made available in 2022, is a browser-based dashboard that
helps inform employers, policymakers, and more on the real prices
that employers pay for hospital services across the country. The
2.0 update integrates new data from the Employer Price
Transparency study, which RAND published earlier today. Users can
now see prices from 2020 to 2022 for more than 4,000 hospitals and
2,000 ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) nationwide along with
brand-new drug price data for physician-administered medications.
Additional features such as the ability to purchase custom
reports from within the platform are on the horizon.
Sage Transparency 2.0 integrates data from the Employer Price
Transparency study, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid
Services, Healthcare Bluebook, the National Academy for State
Health Policy, and January Advisors.
"Sage Transparency started as a way to bring several massive
data sets on hospital prices and quality into a single, digestible
tool of real use to employers," said Gloria Sachdev, President
and CEO of the Employers' Forum of Indiana. "Since it launched in May 2022, we've had over 37,000 user sessions to
inform healthcare purchasing decisions, write news articles, and
even develop health policy. In launching Sage Transparency 2.0, our
team has thought through the major use cases of our free, online
tool and sought to bring even more data to the fingertips of
employers, policymakers, academics, and journalists."
A key new feature in Sage Transparency 2.0 is the new legislator
tab allowing elected officials and their teams to see hospital
price data from every single state and federal legislative district
in the United States. Data science
consultants January Advisors geocoded each legislative
district along with each hospital.
"I found Sage Transparency to be a critical tool to easily
understand the price and quality of hospital services in
Indiana," said Representative
Donna Schaibley, a member of the Indiana House of Representatives and
founding member of the Indiana Health Care Cost Oversight
Task Force. "Having hospital price and quality data on every
legislative district available at the touch of a button is such a
tremendous resource for legislators and their staff. I look
forward to seeing how my colleagues across the country will use
this information to inform their policy solutions."
Beyond hospital facility prices, physician prices, and
ambulatory care surgery center prices, the latest round of the
Employer Price Transparency study for the first time also reveals
the average price paid for physician administered medications, such
as chemotherapy, at health system-level and state level in
Indiana and across the
country. Weighting each state's prices equally, the national median
for commercial insurance prices for physician-administered drugs is
208% of average sales price (ASP), compared with 106% of ASP paid
by Medicare.
"While hospital prices make up the largest slice of the pie for
employer-sponsored insurance plans, prescription prices are the
fastest growing," added Sachdev. "It was a high priority with
Sage Transparency 2.0 to give employers and other users real
transparency into drug prices with the data available at this
time."
Finally, the dashboard now displays expanded quality metrics
from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and new
profitability data from the National Academy for State Health
Policy (NASHP). Sage Transparency 2.0 shows users data on
hospital readmissions, patient safety, and mortality as well
as a quality rating trend graphs over the last twelve
quarters dating back to Q1 2020. NASHP's commercial breakeven price
metric allows users to understand the reimbursement rate a hospital
needs to receive from commercial payers to cover all of its
expenses for hospital inpatient and outpatient services, without
profit. While it is important for hospitals to make a profit, some
are making exorbitant profits due to high prices.
Per the fifth round of the Employer Price Transparency study
published today, the national commercial median price for hospitals
across the country is 253% of Medicare. This translates to
employers and employees paying 2.53 times the price of what
Medicare pays for the exact same services. The median
commercial breakeven price for U.S. hospital is 122%. The
difference is the space to negotiate for a fair price.
About Employers' Forum of Indiana
The Employers' Forum of
Indiana is a not-for-profit
employer-led multi-stakeholder coalition whose mission is to
improve the value payers and patients receive for their health care
expenditures. Forum members include employers, health plans,
hospitals/health-systems, providers, and numerous other interested
healthcare stakeholders who work collaboratively to improve
health care in Indiana.
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SOURCE Employers' Forum of Indiana