Health Insurance Daily

Bush Compels Price And Quality Transparency In Health Care

President George Bush signed an executive order on Tuesday to promote quality and price transparency in health care for federal beneficiaries.

It requires four federal agencies to use health information technology that meets interoperability standards, measure quality of health care providers, develop practices that encourage high-quality care and tell patients the prices of common treatments and procedures. The Health and Human Services Department, Veterans Affairs Department, Office of Personnel Management and Defense Department, which provides health care to soldiers, must adhere to the new rules by Jan. 1.

Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, remarks, “It is a huge deal. As the largest purchaser of health care in the world, whatever the federal government does drives the market. Employers have long wanted these things--advanced HIT, interoperability, transparency, the right data to measure quality and safety-- so having the largest purchaser insist on these standards as a condition of doing business is what we have wanted for a long time. These actions will make all of the difference in the world."

Some private insurers have taken similar steps. For instance, Aetna announced on Monday that it is expanding physician-specific information on health care costs, clinical quality and efficiency on its Web site.

Some doctors oppose efforts to publicly disseminate provider-specific quality information, claiming it causes misunderstandings because clinical quality is complicated to define and difficult to comprehend, given the wide disparities in patient demographics and severity of disease.

Bush comments, "Health care policy ought to be aimed at bolstering the consumer, empowering individuals to be responsible for health care decisions. Medicine is really behind the times when it comes to information technology. We can reduce costs by 25% to 30% with the advent of electric medical records."

Article provided by BenefitNews, August 24, 2006

posted by Mike @ 3:35 AM