Category: Healthcare

Check out the video and story below, a great bit of information from the company I work for, change:healthcare. We recently published our first quarterly HCTI – Healthcare Transparency Index – that shows you some of the trending data we are seeing from our massive data set from all across the US. The gist of it is this: you can shop for everything under the sun but healthcare. You can instantly lookup any Christmas present, car, can of soup, DVD… you name it. But in healthcare that has not been the case until now. change:healthcare works with employers and insurance carriers to show the true cost of medical services, dental services and prescriptions to employees before they have to spend the money. This is freakin’ awesome!

While the government claims to provide pricing for drugs and procedures, those listings only highlight what Medicare and Medicaid are willing to reimburse, not what those services actually cost. Hospitals, doctors and insurance companies provide patients with an itemized bill for care – but only AFTER the fact. The Healthcare Transparency Index, issued today by change:healthcare, is the first to provide healthcare consumers with ongoing trends data about actual healthcare costs – offering insight into critical opportunities for cost savings.

With more than 60 percent of employers in the U.S. expected to offer a consumer-directed health plan (CDHP) in 2011 as a way to curb costs, employees and their families will be increasingly accountable for “shopping” and paying for their healthcare – making it more critical than ever for them to understand the costs involved. To be issued quarterly, the inaugural Healthcare Transparency Index includes data derived from more than 1.3 million medical claims, totaling $220 million, from 90,000 individuals across all 50 states over a 12-month period. Key findings include:

• Prescription drugs offer the highest opportunity for cost savings ($8 million across the HCTI data set), followed by dental, routine primary care physician office visits, psychotherapy, physical therapy and chiropractic. View Chart
• Costs for commonly prescribed drugs can vary greatly. The following prescription drugs offer the greatest opportunities for cost savings for both brand names and generics – by simply switching pharmacies. In fact, an Abilify consumer could save up to nearly $2,500/yr by making a pharmacy change. View Chart
• Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, CVS and WalGreens top the list of pharmacy chains with the widest prescription cost discrepancies for both brand name and generic drugs. View Chart