How this tracker is built

This page is our refresh playbook, published. Everything the tracker states is an observation we can show a receipt for; it is not a CMS compliance determination, and only CMS enforces the Hospital Price Transparency rule.

How we find each file

For every hospital we try, in order: the standard cms-hpt.txt pointer file at the hospital's domain root; the hospital's own price-transparency page; and the transparency vendor's portal when the first two fail. When all three fail we record exactly what we checked and found, verbatim, as that hospital's gap narrative.

What we record

For each capture: the file's URL, the page that led us to it, the vendor serving it, its format, its size in bytes, its SHA-256 hash, the capture date, and how many of our 74 tracked shoppable codes yielded prices. The hash and byte count anchor the claim "this is what the file contained on this date" without our republishing the file. Every capture appends one line to a permanent observation log, so the record accumulates rather than overwrites.

Status definitions

File found — prices extracted

We fetched the file and extracted real prices for at least one tracked code.

File found — no usable prices

We fetched a file, but zero tracked codes yielded prices — for example, a file listing internal chargemaster codes labeled as standard codes.

File located — extraction pending

A standard-charges file exists at a documented URL, but our pipeline has not yet extracted it.

Portal only — no static file

Pricing is offered only through an interactive estimator portal; we found no static standard-charges file.

No file found

We found no standard-charges file or transparency posting; the narrative records exactly where we looked.

What this does not claim

We do not grade hospitals, compute compliance rates, or assert that any hospital violates the rule. A hospital missing some tracked codes may simply not offer those services. Capture is quarterly, so a hospital may have fixed or broken its posting since the date shown. The published dataset carries every number on these pages.