By: Catherine Moore

Hospital Price Transparency requirements were established to provide patients with meaningful access to healthcare pricing information and to promote informed decision-making. Since 2021, hospitals have been required to publicly post both a machine-readable file containing standard charges and consumer-friendly pricing information for certain services. While initial enforcement efforts focused largely on education, recent Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) activity demonstrates a continued commitment to actively monitoring compliance and imposing penalties where deficiencies persist. Although the requirements have been in place since 2021, with new requirements taking effect as recently as January 1, 2026, CMS now is leveraging automation to complete hospital reviews quickly and identifies hospitals to review based on a web scraper tool. CMS performs at least 200 comprehensive hospital reviews “quickly, accurately and consistently” each month.