Advancing data transparency
Hidden Prices, Hidden Costs
Data has the power to improve healthcare market competition by delivering better information about prices, spending, utilization, and outcomes.
Employers and policymakers need more and better data, as well as the expertise and analytic tools to make sense of it, to identify, call out, and correct failures in healthcare markets and adopt smarter, more effective policies and regulations.
Market Competition and Policy Solutions
Transparency is foundational to competitive healthcare markets, smart policies, and accessible, quality care.
The Center and its partners seek to equip health care purchasers and federal and state policymakers with the necessary price, utilization, quality, and financial data to inform their decision-making and promote competitive, productive negotiations between providers and payers.
We are advancing the development of analytic tools to boost transparency, and working with partners to build safe, integrated data collection and information systems that are timely and easily accessible.
Our goal is to improve and restore the potential of market competition and regulatory guardrails to enhance the quality of patient care and reduce healthcare spending.
Our Work
Featured Project
PBGH Healthcare Data Project
The Center is proud to support the Health Care Data Project led by the Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH), a nonprofit coalition representing 40 private employers and public entities across the country. Amid the untenable healthcare affordability crisis, PBGH is equipping employers with vital and unprecedented transparency on the cost and quality of commercial healthcare as well as key insights that will enable them to be effective, prudent purchasers.
Helping Employers and Consumers Evaluate the Cost and Quality of Healthcare Services
The Center offers recommendations to improve hospital price transparency, strengthen employer access to claims data, and leverage transparency for competition, choice, and efficiency.
Strengthening Employer-Based Health Insurance Through ERISA Reform
Employers have reached a breaking point as high healthcare costs have forced them to shift the burden onto employees, making healthcare less affordable. In a commentary for Bloomberg Law, executive director Caroline Pearson writes that strengthening the employer-sponsored health insurance marketplace through ERISA reform is essential to ensuring that employees can access affordable healthcare.
Congressional Testimony on Data Access to Strengthen ERISA
Mairin Mancino testified before Congress in the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions’ hearing on strengthening ERISA and employer-sponsored health benefits. In her testimony, she emphasized the importance of data access for employers to better carry out their fiduciary responsibilities, motivate employer markets, and ultimately reduce healthcare costs.
Data Transparency Action Plan for Employers and Purchasers
The Peterson Center on Healthcare is partnering with Manatt Health to research what employers and other private sector healthcare purchasers need from a national healthcare data infrastructure resource, and to develop an action plan for employer and purchaser engagement.
Congressional Testimony on How Transparency Can Shape Healthcare Markets
Executive Director Caroline Pearson summarized key findings from the Center's work and presented a range of policy options to further advance discrete elements of healthcare data transparency at a Senate Finance Committee hearing focused on healthcare consolidation and the impacts on access, quality and costs.
Unlocking Healthcare’s Black Box: Why Trump’s New Transparency Order Matters for Employers and Consumers
The administration’s executive order is an opportunity to realize transparency’s potential in more functional and efficient healthcare markets.
Why Hospital Price Transparency Is Essential to Improving Employee Benefits
Mairin Mancino discusses how better pricing data can improve employer benefits while lowering costs and enhancing care.
Improving Price Transparency Data: Recommendations From Practice
In Health Affairs, researcher David Muhlestein highlights the challenges of analyzing payer price data and provides recommendations to unlock this data’s full potential.