Transparency Must Start Somewhere (4)

By now I thought some people might post that “it isn’t that easy”, with which I agree. The purpose of using this medium to share these thoughts is to start a conversation that benefits from multiple voices and helps us get to an initial answer. That initial answer will get us farther down the path to price transparency. The alternative is to do nothing and avoid price transparency, maintaining the status quo that minimizes the ability of patients to make choices in healthcare, leading to no improvement in healthcare inflation.

So, perhaps we can agree that our first iteration of healthcare transparency will be a bad answer that we will strive over time to make better. What does that first iteration look like? Here are some starting thoughts to seed a community brainstorming effort.

Option 1 – combine existing codes in a standardized way (described in the last post)

Option 2 – use the local name of the service (despite all of its limitations of comparison)

Option 3 – release a laundry list of billing codes with their prices

Option 4 – create an entirely new set of descriptions

Option 1 is a balanced approach to publishing actionable information for the public with a small delay to standardize definitions. Option 2 has the least comparability, because every local definition will be different, but also might have the least resistance because it leaves providers with some flexibility. One provider might include or exclude related services that have an impact on comparable prices, but as a first step, it might still be better than no data. Option 3 is probably the easiest because all of these codes are known and each has defined Price transparency is not easy or simple, but if we let that be our final answer, we will go nowhere.prices that are currently used for billing. This option would require the least effort because each clinician and facility could simply provide a data dump of their charge master. Option 4 might be where we go in the long term, but seems unlikely to get us transparency any time soon, so if the process breaks down along the way, it simply serves to delay an informed public. I tend to prefer options 1 or 3.

What do you think? Are there other options besides these 4 to consider? How do you rank these 4 options (plus any others proposed in the comments)?

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