A bill awaiting debate in the South Dakota Senate would expand a hospital pricing Web site to include the most common outpatient procedures.

The Web site http://hospitalpricing.sd.gov currently lists the median prices at hospitals for the 25 most common inpatient procedures.

SB182 would expand the pricing information to include outpatient procedures such as laser eye surgery and colonoscopies. The Senate Health and Human Services Committee sent it to the Senate floor on a 7-0 vote last week.

Outpatient procedures make up the majority of business for health care systems, and more people are turning to higher deductible health insurance plans that can mean more out-of-pocket costs.

"This puts South Dakota right at the forefront of things that are meaningful to consumers," said the bill's sponsor, Sen. Tom Dempster, R-Sioux Falls. "We're actually going to have a much more meaningful way of defining what you're going to pay."

All hospitals, clinics, specialty hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers in the state would be subject to reporting the data. If passed, South Dakota would be the first to organize outpatient price data on a site available free to the public.

Collecting the data is no small task, said Dave Hewett, executive director of the South Dakota Association of Healthcare Organizations. The organization, which represents hospitals in the state, collects the inpatient data, which then is sent to the South Dakota Department of Health for the existing site.

"An outpatient procedure is anything from an annual checkup to a triple hernia repair," Hewett told lawmakers. "We may have 900 inpatient procedures, but there are probably 9,000 outpatient procedures that would have to be reported on."

The bill states that the health department would work with SDAHO to establish rules of what information should be included and to develop a list of outpatient procedures to be tracked. The bill was amended to allow that process to take place during the next year before the next legislative session.

The new Web site would be launched by June 1, 2009, and updated at least annually.

Two years of inpatient pricing data are available on the site. During 2007, the site received 75,932 Web hits, according to data from the health department.

Dempster said the next step is to include outpatient procedures, allow people to easily compare costs between hospitals, and show the number of procedures done annually.