Built on public data sources

External pricing-data source

Turquoise Health

Turquoise Health is a nongovernment pricing-data source. Its data is kept distinguishable from CMS and other federal data.

Who originally publishes the data

Hospitals and facilities, in the machine-readable price files they are required to publish. Turquoise Health collects and normalizes those files; it is not the original publisher of the rates.

What Health Worth reads

The hospital rates table in the Turquoise Health Data Community Tier dataset (HOSPITAL_DATA.HOSPITAL_RATES), joined to the matching hospital provider records for location. Health Worth does not use any Turquoise patient, claim, or clinical data.

What the prices are

Payer-negotiated dollar amounts, estimated allowed amounts, and discounted cash prices that hospitals publish under price-transparency rules, along with Turquoise's own median and 10th/90th percentile fields and an outlier flag.

Coverage today

Hospital-published rates for the billing codes Health Worth has mapped, in Tennessee, New York, and Alabama. Coverage varies by procedure, facility, payer, and state; most of the country is not covered yet.

How Health Worth uses it

Only as an additional market observation where it passes Health Worth's own confidence rules. It is never treated as what a person will owe, and it never overrides a federal benchmark silently — every result names the source that produced it.

Live or cached

Cached. A scheduled background job queries the dataset and writes results to a local table. Nothing a visitor does triggers a query to Turquoise.

Refresh schedule

The background job runs continuously in small slices, working through the mapped services and states and re-reading each one on a rolling basis. Rows not seen in a run are marked inactive rather than deleted.

Filtering before use

Rows Turquoise flags as outliers are dropped. Unpriced rows are dropped. Duplicate provider/payer/plan rows collapse to the most recently ingested rate. Provider-eligibility rules for the service are applied. Ranges are reported as median with 10th and 90th percentiles, never minimum to maximum.

Limitations

Published rates are not a quote and are never automatically treated as what a patient will owe. Availability varies by procedure, geography, facility, payer, amount type, and data quality. Files differ in quality between hospitals, a single billing code rarely covers a whole episode of care, and a statewide distribution can hide large differences between nearby facilities.

Kept separate from government data

A result produced from these observations is labelled as external pricing data on the result itself. CMS federal benchmarks are labelled separately, and the two are never merged into a single unattributed number.

Access and attribution

Accessed under Turquoise Health's own data terms through their Snowflake dataset. Health Worth does not describe this as public government data, and no credentials or contract terms are published here. Turquoise Health has not endorsed Health Worth.