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CHIA REPORTS ON CY 2023 PROVIDER PRICE VARIATION IN THE COMMONWEALTH

CHIA REPORTS ON CY 2023 PROVIDER PRICE VARIATION IN THE COMMONWEALTH

DATE: August 7, 2025

CHIA today has published its annual update on provider price variation in the Massachusetts health care market for calendar year (CY) 2023. The relative price (RP) metric shows providers’ average prices compared with a payer’s network average prices, accounting for differences in patient acuity, the types of services delivered to patients, and the insurance products (e.g., HMO, PPO) offered. Consistent with prior years, hospitals with relative prices in the top quartile (inpatient and outpatient combined) accounted for nearly half of all commercially-managed payments to hospitals in 2023.

An accompanying interactive dashboard shows CY 2023 data for Massachusetts hospitals and physician groups and includes payer-specific results for all hospital types and physician groups as well as cross-payer results for acute care hospitals, known as statewide relative price (S-RP).

Key Findings

  • Hospitals in the highest-priced quartile received nearly half (45.9 percent) of all health insurance payments.

  • The lowest-paid acute hospital had commercial prices almost 25 percent below average compared with the highest-paid acute hospital that had prices nearly double the average.

  • All 4 acute care hospitals in the Cape and Islands region had above-average cross-payer relative prices.

  • Academic medical centers had the highest median S-RP at 1.12, indicating that these hospitals had prices about 12 percent above the statewide average. Community hospitals, teaching hospitals, and community-high public payer (HPP) hospitals had median prices 6 percent to 8 percent below the statewide average.

  • Among physician groups, the share of payments going to the quartile of providers with the highest RPs continued to grow, increasing by 8.5 percentage points to 55 percent of payments from 2021 to 2023.

 

This publication also includes an analytic databook, as well as a technical appendix and methodology report. See the Relative Price webpage for more information.