How To: Create an HPT entity

Hospital Price Transparency (hpt) entities are content entities like nodes or taxonomy terms. After enabling hospital_price_transparency you can find the list of hpt entities by linking from the content overview page.

Initially, we will see that there are no hpt entities yet.

We can click "Add hospital price transparency" to create our first hpt entity. This is where we start to see why having a dedicaated entity type is useful. hpt entities have a few special base fields that allow them to easily meet specific requirements of cms.gov.

1. EIN (Employer Identification Number)
2. Hospital Name
3. File
4. Contact name (new in v2)
5. Contact email (new in v2)

Not surprisingly, the File field holds the file that will be served to end users. The other base fields (EIN and Hospital Name) will be used when automatically generating an alias for the file that is served. The guidelines from cms.gov specify a strict naming standard for the file. By using an hpt entity, you can upload a file with any filename (file.json in this example) and it will still be served under an alias that satisfies requirements (123456789_DrupalHealth_standardcharges.json in this example).

If we save this new hpt, we will see it listed.

We can create as many hpt entities as we need. For a hospital system, you may need a separate file for each hospital. Please consult the csm.gov guidelines.

Beginning in v2, the Contact name and Contact email fields are used when generating the cms-hpt.txt file. As described in that doc, the module has global settings for the contact fields that will be used as default values.