Data analytics firm Trilliant Health developed a free artificial intelligence chatbot that enables consumers, researchers, payers and providers to quickly parse through hospital price transparency files.
The AI tool, called Oria, makes healthcare prices for hospital-based services freely accessible, according to Hal Andrews, Trilliant's CEO.
Since 2021, federal regulators have stepped up price transparency requirements for providers and payers. Federal now now requires hospitals to publicly post information about their standard prices and negotiated discount rates for common health services to encourage consumers to compare prices and to promote competition.
But these complex machine-readable files are often messy, inconsistent and confusing, making it challenging for patients and researchers to effectively use the data.
“Although this data is now public, it is often published in formats that make it unusable—or hidden behind paywalls. Trillian Health's AI chatbot removes those barriers "by making hospital price transparency data freely available to everyone," Andrews said.
Trilliant's AI-powered interface allows anyone to ask questions and quickly discover insights from hospital price transparency files, Andrews said.
"We wanted to provide a tool, make it chat-enabled, so consumers, hospitals and others can use the chatbot to query the data," Andrews said. "CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] put out the schema, and people can produce the data three different ways, there's 5,000-plus files out there, and they are out there in one of three ways. We take all the data and put it in the same format and make that free. A user can log in to the chatbot and if they want to find out the rate of a knee replacement in Massachusetts they can do that."
The data are freely available to analysts, consumers, payers, providers and government researchers. "All the files are there in one place, organized apples to apples," Andrews noted.
Oria combines hospital price transparency data with large language models (LLMs), enabling natural language interactions with complex pricing information. Questions that once required extensive engineering and data analysis can now be asked in plain language. Users can ask questions like: What is Cigna's rate for colonoscopies across hospitals in my market? Which hospital does Anthem pay the highest rate for joint replacements? What is the distribution of rates for sepsis across payers?
Trilliant executives caution the free tool is experimental, and AI may make mistakes. It is currently limited to hospital-based services, as it queries the machine-readable files published by hospitals.
The data are currently limited to Massachusetts, and future development will expand coverage nationwide, the company said.
“Oria is our first step toward making hospital price data available to every American,” Andrews said. “Our goal is that price transparency will unleash free market principles in the health economy, forcing stakeholders to compete openly on price, quality and access—and ultimately to reorient their business models toward delivering real value for money.
Trilliant was founded eight years ago by combining three companies to take a different approach to providing data and analytics insights for healthcare organizations. It has expanded its data platform to offer market and predictive analytics for health systems, payers and life sciences companies and also built out a research arm. The company boasts that it works with eight of the 20 largest health systems, three of the five largest ambulatory surgery operators and two of the four largest life sciences firms.
The AI chatbot is the latest in Trilliant's free analytics solutions. The company is "putting its money where its mouth is," Andrews noted. "The healthcare industry has to deliver value for money. We don't think people should pay for things that are free," he said.
The company plans to develop AI tools for all of its analytics solutions and products, he noted.