Potential Antitrust Scrutiny for Healthcare Provider Tools Like Strata Decision Technology

As the presence of algorithms offering customized pricing recommendations has grown throughout the economy, so too has the scrutiny from U.S. antitrust regulators and private litigants over their potential to facilitate information sharing and price-fixing between competitors. The healthcare sector is no stranger to the increasing availability of algorithmic pricing, as evidenced by The Capitol Forum’s May 1, 2025, report about the customized pricing recommendations that Strata Decision Technology’s software tools offer to healthcare providers.

Why It Matters

While Strata’s tools offer providers data that may be valuable in negotiating for higher reimbursement rates from payors and incurring lower labor costs, providers should avoid engaging in the sort of anticompetitive conduct that can result in costly investigations from antitrust enforcers and private civil litigation.

Strata Decision Technology’s Software Tools

On March 3, 2025, Strata Decision Technology, which is a subsidiary of Roper Technologies, announced its collaboration with Snowflake to create a cloud-based enterprise resource planning platform, called StrataJazz, that allows healthcare providers to access financial, operations, clinical and claims data from thousands of their rivals. In addition to these competitor benchmarks, the platform also allows providers to use a cost improvement algorithm to identify opportunities to improve their profits, net revenues, productivity and labor costs to bring them in line with competitors. Strata’s platform uses a combination of information supplied by its healthcare provider customers, publicly available insurance reimbursement rate data and proprietary claims data to offer additional tools that model contracts between providers and payors, track the locations where patients seek care and provide intelligence on market reimbursement rates. The value that such a software platform can bring to a hospital’s operational efficiency is obvious.

Recent Antitrust Scrutiny Over Similar Software Tools

The competitor data and improvement algorithms housed within Strata’s platform draw parallels to the benchmarking databases and algorithms in the meat processing and real estate industries that recently drew the attention of antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice (DOJ). We provide a brief account of such recent enforcement, as well the recent interest the DOJ has expressed in scrutinizing benchmarking databases and algorithms in the healthcare industry.

Meat Processing

• In September 2023, the DOJ brought a civil antitrust lawsuit against Agri Stats, Inc., a benchmarking database for meat processing companies, for organizing anticompetitive information exchanges by “collecting, integrating, and distributing competitively sensitive information related to price, costs, and output among competing meat producers.”
• The DOJ’s complaint classified the meat processing companies that used and contributed to Agri Stats’ platform as co-conspirators and alleged these competing meat processing companies understood that using the benchmarked data was meant to increase prices, even if they had not explicitly agreed on such a strategy.

Real Estate

• In August 2024, the DOJ applied the same scrutiny in the real estate sector by suing RealPage Inc., a rental management software company, for engaging in a conspiracy to raise rental prices and restrict rental supply through the suggested pricing algorithm it offered landlords. In January 2025, the DOJ amended its complaint against the software company to add six landlords that used the platform as defendants who allegedly directly communicated with competitors about rent and occupancy rates.

Healthcare

• While the DOJ has not itself brought an equivalent suit in the healthcare sector, the DOJ has recently shown its interest in applying the same scrutiny to benchmark databases and algorithmic pricing software in the healthcare industry. In March 2025, the DOJ submitted a Statement of Interest in a private litigation brought by a provider class alleging that healthcare payors coordinated through the MultiPlan software to depress reimbursement rates using a common formula and a database of commingled pricing data.
• In its statement, the DOJ specifically argued that using a pricing algorithm to set a “starting point” price qualifies as unlawful coordination even if the final pricing is different, and that exchanging pricing information through a software intermediary qualifies as unlawful information sharing. The DOJ’s statement signals that, even under the new administration, antitrust enforcement will continue to scrutinize benchmarking databases and algorithmic pricing closely — including in the healthcare industry.

Key Takeaways

Healthcare providers contributing to and accessing the competitor data in Strata face a high risk of antitrust investigation and litigation by the DOJ, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), state antitrust enforcers and private litigants. Accessing detailed information about competing providers’ financial, clinical, reimbursement and claims data through the Strata platform carries the same risk as directly sharing such information with competitors. While it is unclear how exactly providers may use the information in the Strata platform to adjust the rates they will accept for their services and how much they will pay in labor costs, that such tools did not ultimately impact a provider’s decision-making may not be an effective defense to antitrust scrutiny. The DOJ’s statement about MultiPlan suggests that healthcare providers using the Strata platform’s cost improvement algorithm and market reimbursement intelligence may be faced with antitrust allegations if those algorithms provide just a starting point for labor costs paid or reimbursement rates sought.