Dirty hospitals and no price data – How can we choose?

What's your number?

Dirty hospitals and no price data – How can we choose?

By Greg Dattilo, CEBS, and Dave Racer, MLitt

October 15, 2021

This is our problem: The cost of health care has spiked higher, but the quality of care is falling. Patients have no effective means of learning the price of care before using it, or of publicly reporting on quality of care in today’s patient-unfriendly health care marketplace. An online Health Information Exchange would change that.

A Health Information Exchange would give you a description of the provider, its price, and patients’ comments. In non-emergency situations, you have plenty of time to examine this information. Then you are able to make a good decision which provider to choose.

Dirty hospital

Several weeks ago, Dave spent an overnight in a Twin Cities’ hospital where he had previously received care. Gladly, Dave had no serious medical problems. What he saw at that hospital, however, astonished him. The hospital had noticeably slipped in quality since his previous stay.

Today, the only way patients can express what they are experiencing with the provider is by answering the health system’s after-care questionnaire. A patient has no way of knowing if those questionnaires make any difference. Dave always gives permission for the hospital to call him for follow-up questions, but no one has ever done that.

Why not create a consumer-friendly health care shopping experience?

When choosing a hospital or physician, patients need quality information. In The Manual – Health Care 2020: Connecting the Dots, we wrote about such a place. We call it the Health Information Exchange.

Imagine if you could buy health care services the same way you buy consumer goods at online stores, like Amazon.com. At Amazon.com, consumers search for price first, product description, quality ratings next, and then what people say about the product. Online shoppers, once they’ve identified what they want, first ask the question, “What’s the price?”

In this article, we share a way a person can ask a health care provider, “What’s your number?” to help make a more informed decision of which doctor or hospital to choose.

There are websites specifically designed to share provider information. Unfortunately they lack critical data that patients need, so only a small number of people use these websites. They do not draw consumers because they lack the most important piece of information – each provider’s prices.

There is a simple way to compare providers’ prices. We’ve defined and proposed it in The Manual – Health Care 2020: Connecting the Dots. It’s based on how insurance companies set reimbursements for providers today. We call it a Medicare-Percent. The Medicare-Percent tells you the percent of Medicare the hospital or doctor will accept as payment in full for a service. Providers should be required to share that number with you. This will answer the patient’s question, “What’s your number?”

On the Health Information Exchange

  • Price – The natural place for a consumer to find a provider’s answer to the question, “What’s your number?” is on the Health Information Exchange – information fully visible to everyone. In this way, patients choosing a provider can compare them with other similar providers based on price. Consumers/patients can easily see which doctor or hospital charges more than others, or learn which scanning service charges the most or least.
  • Quality – The second critical piece of the Health Information Exchange are patients’ comments. This is where patients will praise their doctor or hospital. It’s where Dave would have reported that the hospital he visited was dirty, and the staff seemed unprofessional and inattentive.
  • Services or Products – The third piece of information is, of course, the provider telling you about their services, quality, location, and other facts they believe will convince you to choose them.

Health Information Exchanges will feature simple information, written by patients, which is easily understandable by other patients. This replaces the complicated quality measurements that only medical experts can understand. This will help patients who are looking for a caring provider, to find the one who has good outcomes according to other patients.

Patients also can get their question answered, “What’s your number?”

The Health Information Exchange gives voice to patients to provide feedback about their providers. This is how we create a patient-friendly medical marketplace.

Watch for the next article on Health Information Exchanges where we share how it would be used to protect a young mother’s chance at giving birth in the future.

For additional information about Health Information Exchanges, see https://themanualhealthcare2020.com.

Dave Racer
dgracer@comcast.net