Hospital price transparency
The attestation language, word for word
The CMS technical documentation defines the attestation object and the statement text the file must contain. Quoted verbatim from the schema documentation:
“To the best of its knowledge and belief, this hospital has included all applicable standard charge information in accordance with the requirements of 45 CFR 180.50, and the information encoded is true, accurate, and complete as of the date in the file. This hospital has included all payer-specific negotiated charges in dollars that can be expressed as a dollar amount. For payer-specific negotiated charges that cannot be expressed as a dollar amount in the machine-readable file or not knowable in advance, the hospital attests that the payer-specific negotiated charge is based on a contractual algorithm, percentage or formula that precludes the provision of a dollar amount and has provided all necessary information available to the hospital for the public to be able to derive the dollar amount, including, but not limited to, the specific fee schedule or components referenced in such percentage, algorithm or formula.”
Two mechanics sit beside the text. The schema marks the statement attribute as valid text only - the file carries this wording, not a local rewrite - and pairs it with a confirm_attestation boolean: a form-and-method validator may accept either value, but only true meets the regulatory requirement at 45 CFR 180.50(a)(3). A false confirmation is a parseable admission of noncompliance.
Read the second half of the statement as a promise about derivability. If a charge is a percentage of a fee schedule, the file must carry enough information for a stranger to compute the dollar figure. An attestation over a file that names a schedule without identifying it is a statement the data cannot keep.
Sources
Related guides
YieldGuard audits hospital machine-readable files against the current CMS requirements. Request Compliance Assessment