Healthplan Price Transparency is an initiative by CMS aiming to help people know the price of covered items or services under a given health insurance plan.

The initiative was first called ‘Transparency in Coverage’ and later was renamed ‘Healthplan Price Transparency’. This project supported and advised leadership at both the Center for Medicare (CM) and the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) on implementing health insurance reform requirements (45 CFR Part 147) that supported the transparency initiative.

Project Contributions

I worked on the project as a technical individual contributor supporting a Tech Lead to develop the validator and manage its repository. It differs from my later role on the Hospital Price Transparency project in that I only worked on the technical team.

• Facilitated the comparison of prices for charge items in insurer and hospital mrf’s to aid in sponsor inquiry and inform strategy by creating the MRF Comparison Tool
• Set up CI/CD for the MRF validator GitHub repo, helped answer questions and fix issues, manage repository
• Found and implemented technologies that allowed for XML file validation format as required by the rule
• Assisted in the development of the MRF File Validator