Dive Brief:
- With more employers and health plans providing tools to help patients compare prices for medical procedures, a study in the April issue of Health Affairs looks at how many are doing so and what procedures they're pricing most often.
- The study examined the healthcare shopping trends of 332,255 non-elderly Aetna members from 2011 to 2012.
- Based on their use of Aetna's Member Payment Estimator, an online tool that offers personalized, episode-level price estimates, the most shopped procedures were colonoscopy, followed second by mammogram, and third by childbirth services.
Dive Insight:
While transparency is popular in theory, the actual practice of checking and comparing prices, even when tools are provided, still remains relatively rare. While members' use of Aetna's tool increased over the course of the study, it still remained low, the study found, with just about 3% overall taking advantage of the tool.
Of those who did price shop, the members were typically younger and healthier women who had incurred higher annual deductible spending than those who did not research price information.
“This suggests that our efforts to engage patients with price information are still very much a work in progress,” co-author Anna Sinaiko was quoted by WBUR. She says part of the issue is that patients usually aren't aware of how to get price information when it counts, such as when making appointments and selecting providers, and that this is the key gap that needs to be filled.