Using a five-star system, this beta scorecard celebrates highly transparent providers while identifying areas for improvement in others. Anyone can view and download a shareable PDF scorecard free of charge. But how do you find your score and what the heck does it mean? Well, we’ll tell you.
The basics
Every great story starts at the beginning. Ours starts on our website. Click here and you’ll see the beta search page. There are nearly 6,000 hospitals to search from. Since only certain hospitals are mandated to post their machine-readable files (MRF), only those hospitals will appear in your search results. That means imaging centers, federal hospitals, and other provider types defined by CMS will not appear since they’re not covered in the Hospital Price Transparency Rule. For all search results, you’ll see the same preview information: name, location, type, bed count, and MRF transparency score. The MRF transparency score is our unique score based on the completeness of the hospital’s MRF. To view the full scorecard, either click the “Scorecard” button or the name of the hospital.
Three tabs, one transparency score
Now that you’re viewing the scorecard of a particular hospital, you have three tabs of information you can view. The first is “Provider Information,” the second is “Provider Services,” and the third is “MRF Transparency Scorecard.” The first is self-explanatory, and the second is information on the specific services offered by the provider alongside their rates . The third is where the bulk of your price transparency information lies.
An overview of the Overview
Over sixty different pieces of information went into consideration to generate each hospital’s overall score. If you’re curious exactly how we came up with the score (and what information was or wasn’t included) you can learn about that here. The scorecard of any hospital rated four stars or below will also display recommendations on how to improve the score. These recommendations take into account the completeness of that hospital’s MRF and suggest attributes that need attention or indicate those missing altogether. Hospitals that score five stars do not display recommendations on how to increase their score. If you score five stars and still want to know how you can improve, shoot us an email, you little overachiever.
Attributes on sub-attributes
Under the overall score and recommendations (if applicable) you’ll see a high-level summary of the files. If you hit the down carrot beside each subsection, you can then dig deeper into the sub-attributes of each file. Using the scale, you can see how close to completeness each MRF was in relation to that specific attribute. If you reach a sub-attribute that does not show a colored bar, as you will find within the Professional Fees and Devices subsections, it means you are looking at an attribute that does not influence that hospital’s overall MRF score.
Share those results
Now that you’ve gotten a score and taken a deeper look at the health of the MRF, scroll back to the top of the page and you’ll see there are two buttons on the upper right.
The first, “Get A Complimentary Review,” will lead you to a submission box where you can submit any questions, concerns, or request a review of the score. The second, “Share” will allow you to copy the link to the scorecard, share the results to LinkedIn, share via email, or print out a PDF of the results. Nifty, right?
More questions? Send us an email: info@turquoise.health. While many of the scorecard’s data points can be used as a proxy for how the CMS may address compliance with a hospital, they are not substitutes for an official audit. Only the CMS is the authority on hospital price transparency compliance. For any questions around how the CMS may interpret machine-readable file compliance, contact the CMS directly.