Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online

WASHINGTON: Medicare says it plans to require hospitals to post their standard prices online and to make electronic medical records more readily available to patients.

The head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, said Tuesday the initiative reflects the Trump administration's effort to encourage patients to become decision-makers in their care.

Hospitals are required to disclose prices publicly, but the latest change would put that information online in machine-readable format that can be easily processed by computers.

Likewise, many health care providers already make computerized records available to patients, but starting in 2021 Medicare would base part of a hospital's payments on how well they do.

Verma also announced Medicare is starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for costly new forms of immunotherapy.