On top of health care’s already complex landscape, significant legislative and regulatory activity is expected over the next few years to address health care priorities at the federal and state levels. Most recently, legislative efforts have been aimed at containing soaring costs, reforming payment structures, increasing price transparency, enriching benefit and network design standards to meet the demands of patients, and balancing market power among stakeholders in given geographies and delivery settings.
Considering the flurry of regulatory and legislative activity pushed out recently or in the works, alongside the significance of health care issues on the ballot in recent and forthcoming elections, CPR is excited to launch The Database of State Laws Impacting Healthcare Cost and Quality (SLIHCQ). We’ve created this database in collaboration with The Source on Healthcare Price & Competition at UC Hastings College of the Law to help health care purchasers and business coalitions, policy makers and state legislators, and other stakeholders better understand their regulatory environment as they make efforts to improve access, quality, and reduce costs in health care. We’ll be officially launching the database this Friday, May 17 at our Virtual Summit event from 1-3pm ET- Register here for the webinar!
The SLIHCQ Database will be a free and publicly accessible resource for all to use, housed on The Source website. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we’ve been working over the last year and a half to collect the relevant health care legislation from each state, to sort and catalogue the statutes so users can easily streamline their legislative searches by topic and state, and to build the database’s functionality. For all 50 states, we collected legislation relating to price transparency, provider payment, provider networks, benefit design, and market power.
For example, if you went to the California state home page, you’d find three drop down windows with the ability to select topic category, year, and status of the legislation (enacted, in process, dead).
The text of each state statute is then included and tagged with key issues, including a link to the source of the legislation on the given state legislature’s home page.
Our idea for creating a comprehensive database of state legislation spanning health care cost and quality issues initially came from conversations with employers and health care purchasers who experienced legislative restrictions when implementing desired network changes, benefit designs and payment models. In developing the database, CPR and The Source optimistically hope that we can help purchasers, coalitions, researchers, policy makers and any users more easily navigate regulatory environment in their own state and across all states so that we can continue to progress toward a more value-oriented system.
P.S. Don’t forget to register to join us this Friday, May 17th for our virtual event launching the database.