Price Transparency & TIC

Bexar County Hospital District d/b/a University Health (“University Health” or “UH”) is a large governmental academic medical center based in San Antonio, Texas and serves as the primary safety-net health system for Bexar County. University Health operates acute-care hospital facilities and an employed professional medical group across the greater San Antonio region. University Health uses Epic as its enterprise EMR, billing platform, and contract modeling system. The organization currently maintains a public-facing price transparency program that includes a publicly available chargemaster, a machine-readable file (MRF) containing standard charges—including gross charges, discounted cash prices, payer-specific negotiated rates, and de-identified minimum and maximum negotiated charges—and a consumer-facing price estimator supporting at least 300 shoppable services. University Health's enterprise structure includes a single Tax ID for all hospital facilities and a separate, single Tax ID for its employed medical group, University Medicine Associates (UMA), which includes approximately 900 providers. This structure creates both an opportunity and an expectation for tighter alignment between hospital and professional reimbursement strategy, transparency compliance, and consumer-facing price disclosure. University Health is entering a period of sustained, enterprise-wide growth that will materially increase the scale, complexity, and strategic importance of transparency-related and contract-related capabilities. On the hospital side, University Health is executing the largest expansion in its more than century-long history, including the development of three new inpatient facilities—Retama Hospital, Palo Alto Hospital, and Babcock Specialty Hospital—under the same hospital Tax ID and licensure structure. At the same time, the professional medical group is expanding in parallel by increasing multispecialty access points, scaling ambulatory services, and strengthening clinical integration through facilities such as the Vida and Wheatley clinics. Together, these initiatives are creating a more connected, scalable, and value-oriented delivery system designed to meet future regional demand.
As University Health grows, it is also raising expectations for what transparency and contract infrastructure must deliver. UH is not seeking a basic posting solution, a narrowly defined compliance utility, or a document repository. UH is seeking strategic partnership capable of supporting: - sustained regulatory compliance, - defensible audit readiness, - stronger consumer-facing price experience, - actionable market intelligence across Texas, - centralized managed care contract intelligence, contract modeling, and payment compliance analytics, - more effective alignment between hospital and professional reimbursement, and - direct support for payer contract negotiations and renewals.