Tendo’s Dan Goldsmith discusses CMS’s price transparency mandates, emphasizing infrastructure to standardize data for clear pricing, enhancing healthcare efficiency, and potentially saving the healthcare system billions through reduced friction.
Salt Lake City, Utah - June 12, 2025
Despite new regulations mandating price transparency in healthcare, patients and employers still face opaque healthcare costs. Hospitals publish dense ‘Charge Master’ files in raw CPT codes, and insurer rates remain indecipherable. Worse, actual charges often differ radically from what’s posted.
TechBuzz recently sat down with Dan Goldsmith, CEO and Co-Founder of Tendo, a healthtech firm with offices in Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, to explore why these rules fall short—and how to fix them.
“‘It’s like a car dealership listing prices for every nut and bolt but not the car,’ said Goldsmith. “‘Healthcare transparency' today provides fragmented data, leaving patients unclear on actual costs or contracted rates.”
The Limits of the CMS Mandate
Since 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), covering over 160 million Americans through Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the Health Insurance Marketplace, has required hospitals to disclose negotiated rates and costs for all services and 300 “shoppable” services. A 2023 rule mandates payers share rates and cost estimates online. However, these disclosures, often in complex machine-readable files, lack user-friendly formatting and critical context, like bundled rate details, making it hard for even sophisticated employers and administrators to gain meaningful insights due to inconsistent standardization.
The Infrastructure Gap
Tendo, founded in 2020 by Dan and Jen Goldsmith, views this as an infrastructure failure, not a data issue. “The transparency mandate produced information,” said Goldsmith, “but lacks the tools to make it usable.” Tendo builds infrastructure linking payers, providers, and patients, standardizing and interpreting transparency data to deliver real-time, context-aware pricing for platforms used by employers and consumers. Its platform integrates CMS claims, proprietary data, and commercial datasets to power intelligent routing, personalized care recommendations, and accurate pricing.
Tendo’s Solution
Under Goldsmith's leadership, Tendo is driving patient-focused price transparency to new levels. Its 2023 acquisition of MDsave, announced by TechBuzz , a $150 million deal, added thousands of new providers across 46 states, offering 1,800+ procedures at transparent, bundled prices. MDsave’s platform lets patients search, schedule, and prepay for care, often saving 40–60% compared to typical rates. Tendo's provider network now exceeds 7,000 hospitals, Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs), and clinics and over 170,000 "shoppable offers," reflecting all major medical specialties, including Musculoskeletal (MSK) and Orthopedic, Gastro, Maternity, Cardiac, General Surgery, Urology, ENT, Imaging, Physical Therapy and others.
Employers benefit by integrating these costs into self-funded health plans. About 40 MDsave employees joined Tendo’s 160-person team, enhancing expertise in consumer payments and marketplace technology.
Tendo’s software embeds clean data into care navigation tools, cost estimators, patient intake flows, and employer benefit portals. “You don’t need more spreadsheets,” explained Goldsmith. “You need healthcare to feel like an intuitive digital product.” He advocates for a federal marketplace under HHS, listing bundled care episodes with transparent, purchasable prices to replace opaque reimbursement models.
What Comes Next
On May 16, 2025, CMS issued a new Request for Information (RFI) suggesting future rules may mandate usable data formats and intermediary implementation. Comments are due by June 16, 2025. Tendo is positioning its platform as the infrastructure to meet these needs, enabling real-time price transparency at scheduling, billing, and benefits selection. He says Tendo is facilitating average savings for consumers of 20-40% from pre-negotiated cash-rate contracts with providers. Goldsmith estimates this approach could save the U.S. healthcare system $50 billion annually by reducing administrative friction.
“This isn’t a policy problem anymore,” Goldsmith said. “It’s an infrastructure one—and we’re building the rails.”
For more information, visit Tendo's website.