Building on the February 2025 Executive Order, the Trump Administration continues to take meaningful action to enhance price transparency in healthcare. This is not just a single initiative but part of a broader effort to advance patient-centered policies that unleash the competitive forces of informed, empowered patients, driving innovation and accountability across the healthcare industry.
The Limits of a Fragmented System
America’s healthcare system is widely recognized as inefficient, expensive, and difficult to navigate. For decades, policy and care improvement efforts focused on isolated episodes of care rather than the full patient journey. This approach fueled administrative inefficiencies and placed the burden on patients to navigate a fragmented system on their own.
A Shift Toward Patient-Centered Care
Over time, leaders recognized that improving outcomes required moving away from episodic care toward coordinated, patient-centered care that’s integrated across the entire health journey. This new mindset emphasized alignment around the patient experience, with goals to lower costs, remove access barriers, and improve outcomes. Digitizing health records, standardizing delivery models, and expanding access to clinical data were early steps in this transformation.
Progress Made, Barriers Remain
These changes have empowered patients by improving access to their medical data, reducing duplicative care, and streamlining access. Yet key barriers remain. While patient-centered care has advanced, its benefits are limited without empowering patients to make decisions based on both cost and quality.
The Next Horizon: Price and Value Data
To realize the full promise of patient-centered policy, the next step must focus on helping patients make informed choices grounded in cost and quality data. The old analogy still holds: navigating healthcare is like shopping in a grocery store without price tags. We may have more options, but choice without transparency lacks real value.
The foundation for this next horizon began over five years ago with the implementation of price and coverage transparency regulations. Still, more work is needed to ensure this data becomes a practical tool for patients and providers alike.
Watch our webinar on price coverage and transparency to see how leading organizations are turning complex, public pricing data into actionable insights that reduce costs and improve decision-making across the healthcare ecosystem.
Policy Momentum and Legislative Action
To continue progress, transparency efforts must be expanded to include detailed, standardized pricing and coverage data that is both usable and accessible. Strengthening and broadening these regulations requires codifying them into law. Encouragingly, bipartisan legislative efforts, such as the recently introduced Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, represent an important step toward a more competitive, efficient, and consumer-driven healthcare marketplace.
Simplifying Quality, Leveraging Technology
For patients to make value-based decisions, quality measures must be simplified and standardized. These metrics should be agile enough to reflect personalized care priorities and easily comparable across providers. Technology plays a vital role in this effort, ensuring patients can access understandable information 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.
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