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) — 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.
Sage Transparency 2.0 Screenshots
