Healthcare price transparency needs usable data, not just compliance

The Department of Health and Human Services has a message for companies that haven’t been complying with rules regarding healthcare price transparency data:

“HHS is finally getting serious about price transparency.”

That came in an HHS video posted on social media last week. Separately, the administration sent more than 500 hospitals letters noting they could soon be facing fines due to noncompliance.

This push to make sure providers are making their pricing data available is a welcome development.

Compliance is welcome, but it is not usability

It’s great news that the administration is starting to get more serious about compliance with the CMS requirements for healthcare price transparency.

But we must remember that while compliance is one thing, obtaining data that can create real pricing change in the healthcare industry is something else entirely.

As Ria Shah has pointed out before, compliance does not equal usability. Handl Health routinely comes across data that is compliant on its face but can’t be used in any analysis.

What Handl sees in the data

We typically flag between 20% and 30% of all the price transparency rates we ingest as outliers. Even across some of the largest insurance carriers, Handl typically rejects around 20% to 25% of the data it receives.

Take a look at the first half of 2026: We fielded 47 requests to add networks into our data set, and 11 did not meet our data requirements.

That’s because data was missing, unstable or it just wasn’t strong enough to give us confidence that the rates were accurate.

Data quality standards are the next step

The only way to achieve lower-cost, higher-value healthcare for Americans is by focusing on generating robust healthcare industry pricing data.

That means focusing on MRF regulation compliance and, more importantly, introducing data quality standards that make every MRF complete and usable for price comparisons.