More Health Plans Revealing Treatment Prices
About 40% of health plans tell patients the price of health care services, showing a continuing trend toward cost and quality transparency, according to a survey from the National Business Coalition on Health.“As more and more employers move towards consumer-driven health care, they need to know how to trade off costs between doctors and spend responsibly,” says Dennis White, senior vice president of value-based purchasing for NBCH.
Health plans are increasingly providing practitioner-specific cost information, with 7% of them putting the information online for patients. White says the growth of health care consumerism is causing an increase in patient responsibility and interest in weighing costs. Health insurers are starting to aggregate data about doctors and hospitals, especially concerning high-cost and high-risk procedures, in order to make the information more usable.
Additionally, more health plans are collaborating to release community report cards. About 36% of health plans are pooling data with one or more health care providers in order to measure and report performance information to the public, NBCH finds. Based on this performance data, 23% of health plans have organized practitioners into tiered networks. “Tiered networks distinguish performance of doctors and hospitals, based on things like economics and quality of treatment,” says White.
Companies can use this performance information to change their health plan design and encourage employees to use higher-quality doctors. Meanwhile, 28% of health plans reported giving periodic financial rewards to outstanding doctors and hospitals.
Article provided by BenefitNews.com 7-27-06
posted by Mike @ 8:20 AM
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