Hospital price transparency
Wrong file location and broken links
CMS requires the machine-readable file to be prominently displayed on the hospital's publicly available website. The CY 2024 rule made 'prominent' concrete: a link in the footer of the hospital's homepage, labeled 'Price Transparency', and a .txt file in the website's root directory that includes the file's location. A file that is posted somewhere a crawler cannot predict fails the public-availability purpose even if it technically exists online.
Website redesigns are the classic breakage. The file was linked from a page that no longer exists, the URL changed when a vendor migrated hosting, or the link now returns a 404 or a redirect chain that ends in an error. Nobody inside the hospital notices because nobody inside the hospital downloads the file from the public site. Monitoring finds it only if someone looks from outside.
CMS monitors from outside. Its enforcement page describes a process built on complaints and CMS monitoring, leading to warning notices, corrective action plans and civil monetary penalties. A broken link is one of the cheapest failures to create and one of the easiest for a reviewer to confirm.
The operational fix is a calendar item, not a project: after any website change, download the file the way a stranger would, starting from the homepage footer. If that path breaks, the posting is broken.