# Negative pressure wound therapy, small wound in Athens, GA

Billing code `97605`. Prices for this code at 10 hospitals within 35 miles of Athens, taken from the machine-readable standard charge files each hospital is required to publish under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Rule (45 CFR 180.50).

Source page: https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/athens/negative-pressure-wound-therapy-small-wound

HC NEGATIVE PRESSURE WOUND THERAPY DME </= 50 SQ CM

**Where this is done matters more than which hospital:** Negative pressure wound therapy, small wound is a procedure a doctor's office can perform, and Medicare pays about 5.4x more for it at a hospital outpatient department than in an office. Every price below is a hospital's, and excludes the doctor's separate bill. Do not quote these as the cost of the procedure without saying which setting they describe.

## Before quoting any figure below

- **Hospital charges only.** The surgeon, anaesthetist, radiologist and pathologist bill separately and appear in no hospital price file, by construction. Every figure below is part of a total, never the total.
- **A negotiated rate is not a bill.** It is what a hospital and an insurer agreed. What a patient owes depends on their deductible, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum.
- **Each hospital's figure is a median across its own plans.** The spread inside one hospital is often wider than the gap between two of them.
- **"not mentioned" is not $0.** It means this hospital's file does not label a row that way. Silence is not a statement that the charge does not exist.
- **A hospital absent from the table says nothing about its prices.** It may publish this code under a revenue or drug code this site cannot map to a procedure.

A procedure code is billed twice -- once by the hospital for its own costs, once by the doctor for their work -- and hospitals publish different sides of that split under the same code. Of the hospitals here, 3 publish a facility charge; 1 publish both, mixed together; 6 do not label which half the figure is.

## Typical price

|  | Amount |
|---|---|
| Cheapest tenth | $146 |
| Typical | $419 |
| Dearest tenth | $531 |

The cheapest and dearest tenth are the hospitals a tenth of the way in from each end, not the single cheapest and dearest. Every hospital, including both extremes, is in the table below.

That is a 4-fold difference for the same billing code, between hospitals within 35 miles of each other -- a gap between hospitals, not between treatments.

## Every hospital publishing this code

| Hospital | Where | CMS rating | Typical | Facility charge | Physician fee | Self-pay | Lowest | Highest | Plans on file |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| St Mary's Hospital | ATHENS (0.0 mi) | 1/5 | see split | $596 | $6 | $172 | $2 | $596 | 4,659 |
| St Marys Good Samaritan Hospital | GREENSBORO (29.6 mi) | 4/5 | $161 | $161 | not mentioned | $148 | $49 | $205 | 109 |
| Northeast Georgia Medical Center | GAINESVILLE (34.5 mi) | 3/5 | $202 | $202 | not mentioned | $631 | $197 | $207 | 4 |
| NGMC Barrow | WINDER (16.3 mi) | 4/5 | $206 | $206 | not mentioned | $631 | $201 | $211 | 4 |
| Northside Hospital Gwinnett | LAWRENCEVILLE (28.8 mi) | 3/5 | $350 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $478 | $21 | $637 | 1,586 |
| Piedmont Eastside Medical Center | SNELLVILLE (34.4 mi) | 2/5 | $419 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $381 | $191 | $1,271 | 51 |
| Piedmont Newton Hospital | COVINGTON (33.7 mi) | 3/5 | $419 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $381 | $124 | $1,271 | 49 |
| Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center | ATHENS (0.0 mi) | 4/5 | $422 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $381 | $135 | $1,271 | 54 |
| Morgan Medical Center | MADISON (24.6 mi) | not rated | $498 | not mentioned | not mentioned | not published | $498 | $550 | 16 |
| Piedmont Walton Hospital | MONROE (18.9 mi) | 4/5 | $833 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $381 | $114 | $1,144 | 45 |

## Self-pay

Self-pay is what the hospital charges someone paying themselves rather than through insurance. Paying self-pay usually does not count toward a deductible, so it can cost less for one service and more across a year. Every other figure here is what an insurer pays, not what a patient would.

At 5 of the 9 hospitals here that publish a self-pay price it is LOWER than what that same hospital typically accepts from an insurer; at the other 4 it is higher.

## The doctor's side, roughly

Nationally, Medicare allows about $23 for the clinician who performs or reads this service, across 143 billing providers in 2024. That is a separate bill from everything above and is NOT added to any figure on this page -- it is here to show the rough size of what a hospital price leaves out.

## Others in physical & occupational therapy

- [Therapeutic exercise, 15 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/therapeutic-exercise-15-minutes) -- 107 hospitals, typically $53
- [Hands-on manual therapy, 15 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/hands-on-manual-therapy-15-minutes) -- 107 hospitals, typically $57
- [Neuromuscular retraining, 15 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/neuromuscular-retraining-15-minutes) -- 105 hospitals, typically $52
- [Walking and gait training, 15 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/walking-and-gait-training-15-minutes) -- 105 hospitals, typically $44
- [Therapy using everyday activities, 15 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/therapy-using-everyday-activities-15-minutes) -- 105 hospitals, typically $57
- [Self-care and daily living training, 15 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/self-care-and-daily-living-training-15-minutes) -- 105 hospitals, typically $46
- [Physical therapy evaluation, low complexity](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/physical-therapy-evaluation-low-complexity) -- 104 hospitals, typically $137
- [Physical therapy evaluation, moderate complexity](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/physical-therapy-evaluation-moderate-complexity) -- 104 hospitals, typically $134

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Every procedure with a published price in GA: https://clearcharge.org/price/ga
Prices that look wrong: info@clearcharge.org

Compiled by Clearcharge (clearcharge.org) from each hospital's machine-readable standard-charge file. When quoting a figure, cite the source page above. The hospital files behind these figures state data through dates from 2026-02-15 to 2026-07-28; per-hospital staleness is flagged above.