Dive Brief:
- Ascension’s St. John Health System is taking strides toward full transparency in procedure pricing by joining Oklahoma's transparent medical network (TMN), Forbes reports.
- Transparency has been on the rise in Oklahoma for several years and has been shown to lower surgical costs by 50-90%.
- "Now that the largest nonprofit health system in the country is joining the TMN movement, it promises to break open the most opaque industry in the country," David Chase wrote for Forbes.
Dive Insight:
Ascension's move could indeed help foster a landscape of true healthcare price transparency, as the TMN goes beyond simply showing insurer pricing by providing real cash prices of healthcare organizations, which forces prices downward.
"This will call into question anachronistic PPO networks and finally bring true market pricing to healthcare," Chase suggests.
He notes organizations can use the TMN to list only certain services, and add or remove them as they become comfortable or adjust their procedure pricing. Or, they can be aggressive in providing increased transparency.
As Ascension St. John CEO David Pynn told Tulsa World, "I believe that health systems like St. John need to do whatever they can to lower the costs of healthcare, and I think that population health is a reality that is coming. I don’t think higher deductibles and shifting costs to employees is the answer."