Healthcare system changes: a cost-conscious audience is a very hard surface for hospitals to land on

There is a prevalent opinion that the current healthcare system is so malleable as to be impossible to change; it can adapt to anything and it will never change; just like water, it takes whatever shape the environment imposes. At CashDoctor.com we think the analogy is faulty. But even if it were true, it is our belief that a cost-conscious audience in healthcare is a very hard surface for hospitals to flung against. We have been advocating for years for a world wide directory of hospital costs per procedure; hospitals and providers start to discover this only now.

It seems now that hospitals and health systems are discovering the "hard surface": according to this recent post from ModernHealthcare.com there are good signs that parts of the healthcare system are starting to review and revise both, their policy about price transparency, as well as their prices. Why? Because increasingly consumers experience "sticker shock when they pay for services out of pocket under high-deductible health plans", writes Melanie Evans. Since consumers must pay for services such as office visits, diagnostic imaging, obstetric ultrasounds, colonoscopies and physical therapy, they demand to know what these services cost and how it compares to other providers.

This, in turn, affect hospitals. According to Dana Gilbert, formerly the chief operating officer at Advocate Physician Partners and now chief of population health for Chicago-based Presence Health "as more consumers have to pay more things out of pocket, it rises in importance of things that health systems are looking at".

The net result is that hospitals are starting to investigate how prices compare against the actual cost of delivering services and how they compare with other providers in the market. In many cases, hospitals find differences that can't be explained by underlying differences in cost. The example Melanie Evans gives to illustrate the wide variation of prices for the same procedure is the cost of MRI test with the same CPT code: turns out it can vary from $64 to $476!

We have created CashDoctor.com to be a place where consumers can share today the actual cost of health care and provide personal ratings of various providers and facilities they came in contact with. Why not hospitals as well?

Never has there been a better time in the history of our nation for a transparent free marketplace in healthcare and a free platform such as CashDoctor.com to power it up. Read today our 8 word solution to healthcare. Usership is FREE via web and mobile app. Visit www.CashDoctor.com or download our app in the app store or google play.