Healthcare Price & Quality Transparency

It's essential that we all help drive the future health care payment system to promote high quality and cost-effective care. A major part of this effort is helping employers gain insight into health prices and quality, to drive better outcomes for their members and extract more  value from the health care system overall.

This needs to be done collectively.

How can your organization encourage its population to shop for health care providers and services based on price and quality? This can feel like an overwhelming challenge for most employers, and my initial suggestion is not to do it alone.

Work With Your Peers

Don't go it alone. Employers are busy running their organizations, so they naturally can spend all their resources tackling healthcare. However there is strength in numbers and there are industry groups all over the country, where best practices are shared amongst peers, because they understand power is in numbers and it will take the force of many to create real change.

Furthermore, not every employer has experienced (and solved for) every type of high-cost claimant, specialty medicine or gene therapy drug. So joining a collective that shares information, allows employers to make better decisions faster, and ensure the advice they're being given from their consultant or broker is sound.

For example: Health Rosetta is creating and partnering to make foundational resources, standards, code sets, and tools for building and adopting high-performance health plans free and publicly available.

The Need for Transparency

Health care does not function like other markets ~ consumers have limited access to the price of services, and the "quality" information regarding specialty providers, is many times provided by primary care physicians employed in the same health systems as the referrals being given.

Insight into the cost and quality of care is critical for consumers to make decisions about care which will lead to an outcome that will let them get back to their normal lives the fastest.

All employees should have adequate access to this type of information and Catalyst for Payment Reform has designed tools to help you tackle the challenge of price & quality transparency head on, and evaluate whether a selected transparency tool is meeting the needs of your plan, employees and fiduciary responsibilities.

Evaluating Transparency Tools

The price and quality of health care can be displayed in a price and quality transparency tool. However, not all transparency tools have the key functionalities to make shopping for care easy for consumers. Learn about the key capabilities a transparency tool should possess.   

Download: A resource to assess your options for price transparency tools in today’s market place.

Understanding the Nuances of Price Transparency

Learn what price transparency is and how it can help employer-purchasers improve health care offerings for covered populations. This Price Transparency Action Brief offers concrete action steps purchasers can take to drive transparency in the health care marketplace.

About Catalyst for Payment Reform

Catalyst for Payment Reform (CPR) is an independent, nonprofit corporation with the mission to catalyze employers, public purchasers and others to implement strategies that produce higher value health care and improve the functioning of the health care marketplace.