Hospital price transparency
The missing or misnamed .txt file
The CY 2024 rule added a small file with an outsized job: a .txt file in the website's root directory that states the location of the machine-readable file. It exists so that automated tools can find the data file predictably, without scraping page structures that differ from hospital to hospital.
The naming of the data file itself is also prescribed, built from the hospital's EIN and name. A file named for a vendor's export job or a date-stamped working copy breaks the convention that lets reviewers and aggregators confirm they have the right file for the right hospital.
These are the easiest requirements to satisfy and among the easiest to check from outside. The .txt file either answers at the root or it does not. The data file's name either follows the convention or it does not. Both failures are common after website migrations, because the small files live outside the content management workflow that moves everything else.
Add both to the post-migration checklist and to the annual update workflow. A new data file version with a renamed export name is a silent regression that the next reviewer will catch before the hospital does.