Building on the February 2025 Executive Order, the Trump Administration continues to take meaningful action to enhance price transparency in healthcare. This action is not just a single initiative, but the latest transformative piece in the effort to advance patient-centered policies that unleash the competitive forces of an informed, empowered patient and drive innovation and accountability across the healthcare industry.
The Limits of a Fragmented System
Our healthcare infrastructure and system are widely recognized as inefficient, expensive and difficult to navigate. That’s partly because past policy and care improvement efforts centered around a limited vision of single episodes of care. For decades, this approach fueled inefficiencies and the associated administrative costs of a siloed care delivery structure, placing the burden on patients to navigate a broken system.
A Shift Toward Patient-Centered Care
However, there was a growing realization that to improve outcomes, our approach needed to move away from the idea that healthcare is delivered in a series of isolated medical encounters to one that is patient centered and longitudinal in approach, focused on coordination and integration across the patient journey. A new mindset began to take root, and the approach to healthcare delivery and necessary policy initiatives followed. This shift re-centered the focus on aligning to the patient care journey to lower costs, remove barriers to access, and improve outcomes. Digitizing health records, standardizing care delivery, and increasing access to clinical data were early steps in this transformation.
Progress Made, Barriers Remain
While ongoing work continues to improve these efforts, they’ve been critical in empowering patients with access to their own clinical data, eliminating duplicative care, and creating more seamless, access care.
However, while some barriers for patients have begun to erode, impediments to the realization of competitive forces and subsequent bending of the cost curve in health care remain. Yes, patient centered care has improved, but the benefits are limited without empowering patient care decisions with price and quality data.
Realizing the Next Horizon in Healthcare: Price and Value Data
To continue to realize the full value of these past policies and foster the benefits of market forces in healthcare, the next horizon of patient centered policy must focus on helping patients make decisions based on cost and quality. The old comparison of healthcare to shopping in a grocery store without prices unfortunately still holds true. We may now have more ability to choose our grocery store, but there is little value if none of the places we shop reflect the real price we pay. What good is choice without the ability to determine value?
A cornerstone to building toward this next horizon was put into place a little more than five years ago with the implementation of transparency in pricing and coverage regulations. Yet, more work is needed to build on this progress.
Watch our webinar on price coverage and transparency to see how leading organizations are turning complex, publicly available pricing data into actionable insights that drive cost savings and improve decision-making across the healthcare ecosystem.
Policy Momentum and Legislative Action
These efforts must be expanded to continue to release detailed, standardized pricing and coverage data to ensure the information is usable and accessible for patients.
To effectively strengthen and expand upon these regulations, they must be codified into law. We are encouraged by ongoing legislative efforts to make that a reality, including such provisions included in the recently introduced bipartisan Patients Deserve Price Tags Act. These efforts represent another major step toward a more competitive, efficient, and consumer-driven healthcare marketplace.
Simplifying Quality, Leveraging Technology
Standard and universal quality measures need to be simplified, streamlined, and agile enough to equip patients to make personalized value assessments and care decisions that are best for them. Innovative technologies need to be applied to make accessibility to patients easier, more understandable, and at their fingertips in real time.
Imagine the impact on healthcare if patients are empowered not only with actual prices, but also with the associated out-of-pocket cost, quality of care before receiving it, and a requisite ability to understand the impact of these forces on their health and finances. Now supplement that with tech-enabled, coverage and navigation tools like networks built from quality and value data to better inform and improve the patient experience and address unique patient needs.
The Power of the Informed Patient
Access, quality and cost must come together to inform value to deliver true patient empowerment. Only then will there be real impact on the ever-increasing costs and finally bring tangible competitive forces to healthcare.
Downward pressure on the healthcare cost curve can only be achieved through the power of informed and empowered patients.
