March 22, 2021 – Hospitals that have published their previously confidential prices to comply with a new federal rule have also blocked that information from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites, according to a Wall Street Journal examination.
A federal rule aimed at making healthcare more consumer friendly required pricing info to be disclosed. But hundreds of hospitals embedded code in their websites that prevented Google and other search engines from displaying pages with the price lists.
The web code keeps pages from appearing in searches, such as those related to a hospital’s name and prices. The prices are often accessible other ways, such as through links that can require clicking through multiple layers of pages.
“It’s technically there, but good luck finding it,” said Chirag Shah, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies human interactions with computers. “It’s one thing not to optimize your site for searchability, it’s another thing to tag it so it can’t be searched. It’s a clear indication of intentionality.”
Healthcare organizations that employed this strategy include some of the biggest U.S. healthcare systems, such as HCA Healthcare Inc., Universal Health Services Inc, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and NYU Langone Health. Some regional systems also had such code on their websites, including Beaumont Health and Novant Health.
Penn Medicine, NYU Langone and Novant Health said that they used blocking code to direct patients first to information they considered more useful than raw pricing data for which they also included links. Universal Health uses the blocking code to ensure consumers acknowledge a disclosure statement before viewing prices, a spokesperson said.
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