Health plan consumer tools increasing

WASHINGTON – In a nod to “consumer-driven” health care, insurers are increasingly offering tools to help their members compare price and quality information about hospitals and doctors, but the tools’ usefulness is limited, a new report says.
The report, by the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonprofit policy group, notes that health plans are offering more and more price data on inpatient and outpatient procedures and services, but it says the information often isn’t specific to individual providers, and prices for services in doctors’ offices are rarely offered.
When reporting quality information, insurers are generally relying on third-party sources, the report says, instead of using their own claims data.
“While health plans are devoting a lot of attention to price and quality transparency tools, we’re a long way from a critical mass of consumers trusting and using the information to choose physicians and hospitals,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of HSC and a co-author of the report, in a news release.
In fact, HSC researchers found that none of the health plans they interviewed believed their enrollees were using the supplied data extensively, in part because few had incentives in their benefit plans to encourage cost comparisons.
The researchers also found plans are weighing the advantages of providing price and quality information against potential pitfalls, including the possibility that consumers might misinterpret information, presuming, for example, that high-cost providers offer higher-quality services.
The Center for Health System Change is a nonpartisan policy research organization funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded this health plan study. To learn more, go to www.hschange.org.