"The findings suggest that hospitals do not make decisions in isolation; rather, their decisions reflect market pressure from their peers," said Ge Bai, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School and senior author of the report. "If the average compliance status in the same region is high, a hospital is more likely to comply."

The Hospital Price Transparency Rule, managed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, requires individual hospitals to provide clear pricing information online about the services they provide. The information must be posted in a file format that can be imported or read into a computer system. Hospitals also must include standard pricing for at least 300 services, ranging from colonoscopies to CAT scans. Hospitals are not required to disclose prices for emergency services under the new rule.

The rule is designed to allow consumers to compare prices and estimated cost of services. It also can help patients make more-informed decisions about care, increase hospital competition and potentially drive down costs. Non-compliant hospitals can face penalties of up to $2 million a year until they share pricing information in compliance with the new requirements.

A hospital's health information technology preparedness, defined as the proportion of a hospital's fixed assets devoted to health IT purposes, also is associated with greater compliance. "Interestingly, hospitals that have invested more in health IT are more likely to post their pricing information online," Bai said. "This could be because they have more financial resources and personnel to mitigate the cost for implementing the Price Transparency Rule."