The price files your hospital is required to post break more often than anyone notices.
A migration moves a file. A vendor renames it. A redesign drops the footer link. Nobody notices — until a warning letter arrives. RootCheck scans your hospital's website every week and flags what a federal reviewer would find, with plain-English instructions to fix it.
Free · results in one business day · we only look at what's already public on your website · no sales call
Enforcement is no longer theoretical
Since a February 2025 executive order made price transparency a White House priority, CMS has picked up the pace: roughly two-thirds of hospitals it has reviewed received warning notices or corrective-action requests, and it has publicly fined more than two dozen hospitals — every name posted online. Penalties are tiered by size and inflation-adjusted: currently $342/day for the smallest hospitals, $11 per bed per day for most, up to $6,277/day for hospitals over 550 beds — more than $2.2 million a year.
States are stacking their own laws on top. Colorado bars hospitals not in material compliance from pursuing collections on patient debt; a dozen-plus states now add fines or collection bans of their own.
What we check
Every published technical requirement in 45 CFR Part 180 — your cms-hpt.txt file, your machine-readable file against the current CMS schema, your footer link, your shoppable services display, access barriers, freshness, and the state rules that apply to your locations. We run CMS's own published validator as one of our checks — then watch everything it doesn't.
What we don't check: whether the prices inside your file are accurate. That's between you and your chargemaster team. We make sure the files regulators look for are live, valid, and findable.
See the full checklist
- A valid
cms-hpt.txtat the root of the domain hosting your MRF, with correct location, source-page, MRF, and contact fields for every location - MRF publicly accessible and valid against CMS schema v3.0 — including the 2026 named-executive attestation, NPI, and allowed-amount fields
- No banned placeholder values (CMS outlawed "999999999" dollar fields in May 2025)
- All required standard charge types present — gross, discounted cash, payer-specific negotiated, and de-identified min/max
- Correct naming:
<ein>_<hospital-name>_standardcharges.[json|csv] - A footer link labeled "Price Transparency" pointing to the page that hosts your MRF
- Shoppable services display or price estimator tool per §180.60
- No access barriers — no logins, CAPTCHAs, or blocked automated access
- MRF freshness — we warn you before your file's required annual update lapses
- Applicable state-level transparency rules for your locations
Already have a price transparency vendor? Keep them.
Your MRF vendor builds the file. RootCheck verifies it's actually live, findable, valid, and linked — every week. Most failures we catch happen after the vendor hands off: website migrations, renamed files, dropped footer links, a firewall that quietly starts blocking automated access. We're the smoke detector, not the electrician.
And there's nothing to connect: we only look at what's already public on your website. No PHI, no logins, no BAA, no security review, no IT ticket.
How it works
- We scan your site weekly. Fully automated. If every check passes, you get a one-line "all checks passed."
- If something breaks, you know at the next scan. A plain-English alert tells you what failed, where, and how to fix it.
- You keep the receipts. Every scan is archived — a documented monitoring history showing you find and fix issues fast.
Simple pricing
Weekly scans · alerts · scan history · cancel anytime
Or $1,990/year, invoiced — procurement-friendly
Why so little? Because it's fully automated and we never touch your systems — no implementation, no procurement cycle, no IT project. Less than one hour of outside counsel, per year.
Get your free scan
Tell us your hospital's website address and we'll check where you stand on every item above — pass or fail, item by item, with fix instructions. Results within one business day. If everything we check passes, we'll tell you that too, and we won't email you again unless you ask us to.
Free · results in one business day · we only look at what's already public on your website · no sales call