Aetna continues its effort to provide information on physician pricing and quality with the announcement that it is now publishing data for the Washington DC metro area. Given the problems encountered by members of other health plans trying to be good “consumers”, this initiative, while very limited, is certainly going to help Aetna’s DC-area members.
What’s missing are the pricing and outcomes for procedures that are less common, but potentially more costly and more critical to individual patients – minor surgery, major surgery, endoscopy, etc.
What does this mean for you?
A step in the right direction, but only a small step. Consumers will need a lot more information in a lot more areas if the whole consumer-directed thing is going to have any chance.
and thanks to Fierce Healthcare for the heads up.
Aug
23
Another big development in the direction of transparency occurred yesterday: President Bush signed an Executive order requiring 4 federal agencies to share pricing information. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060822-2.html
Happy reading!
Wellpoint announced two days ago that it plans to roll out high deductible health plans for its entire market from large employers to individuals starting 1/1/07. It also expects to have pretty complete pricing transparency available to help its customers make informed healthcare decisions. Some attempt at quality metrics will also be part of the equation. Since 88% of its hospital admissions are covered under case rate or per diem charge contracts, pricing transparency should not be very hard to implement for hospital charges and will be interesting to see. A price for the complete episode of care including doctors and/or surgeons fees, imaging, blood tests, pathology, drugs, etc. might be somewhat more challenging.
At the end of the day, an all-in price for everything connected with the episode of care is what the consumer really needs, and, hopefully, such package pricing will become commonplace reasonably soon.
wish I could find this data on their site.