Health Care Trends: Price Transparency Moves to the Forefront

Price transparency is being touted as one of the chief tools to increase the quality and reduce the costs of health care. Although hospitals and physicians may have put up resistance to the price transparency movement at first, many are now either cooperating or preparing to cooperate with mandates for more disclosure on a variety of issues related to safety, performance, and comparisons with other providers. For the medical device community, the changes have been a reason to gauge how the evolving transformation might alter provider needs, but the whole transparency movement is poised to hit device manufacturers much closer to home than that.