In recent times, the health care industry has gone to a great deal of trouble to be more transparent — to share the costs and outcomes of procedures and services with stakeholders. The idea is to get consumers interested enough in this data that they'll use it to guide their medical decisions. This, in turn, is supposed to push providers to bring their ‘A’ game the table, both in affordable pricing and quality deliverables.
Without a doubt, consumers are showing more interest in health care data, in forms ranging from researching their health conditions online to uploading information into personal health records and apps and using connected health and fitness devices that transmit data to other health entities.
And CMS, at least, is making an effort to make data available to all who care to see it. For example, this week the organization announced that it was releasing data on the averag amount hospitals bill for inpatient and outpatient services starting with charge data from 2012. The data includes charges for the 100 most common inpatient stays at more than 3,000 hospitals across the U.S. And there's some data that might be of interest to consumers in there; for example, treatment for back problems increased by $2,000 between 2011 and 2012.
But though you might think consumers would be excited to learn what providers are charging and, perhaps even more importantly, how well they perform, think again. While other user groups — such as employers, health plans and researchers — have dug deeply into such data more or less from the moment that it became available, consumers haven't been major users.
There's no consensus out there as to why more consumers aren't empowering themselves with this data, but it's easy to hazard a few guesses:
- Intimidation: While consumers don't want to pay extra for their care, particularly if it doesn't lead to better care, they are likely to find the form in which this data is presented to be somewhat intimidating. Your average consumer with no IT experience isn't going to joyfully dig into a CMS database and pinpoint where he should be getting his care. It's just too foreign an experience.
- Habit: Though health policy types have been trying to get consumers interested in using the data, consumers are still in the habit of relying on referrals from their existing providers — and to a more limited extent, reviews from other sites that grade doctors and hospitals. Convincing consumers to become proactive enough to wade through data search tools is asking a tremendous amount of your average person. They've already got ways of finding providers that work for them.
- Availability: At this point, most of the health quality and price data can't be mined by making a casual web search. Until such data is available on an extremely simple-to-use website or mailed to the consumer in colorful brochures that demand to be looked at, it will be invisible to most consumers.
What I find terribly frustrating about all this is that I believe the drive toward consumer transparency is based on flawed assumptions. Now that insurance companies are imposing large deductibles on beneficiaries, many observers assume that they'll be forced to get more involved in health pricing and quality ratings. In that dream world, consumers will vote with their wallets and impose discipline on the health care marketplace. But do you see the slightest sign of that happening?