Findings from HCFO-Funded Work Featured in Article on Price Transparency

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As Laura Newman discusses in a piece for Patient POV, price transparency is one strategy many view as a way to reduce health care spending and offer consumers choice. She discusses findings from a HCFO-funded study from Anna Sinaiko, Harvard University, that found among early adopters, those searching for prices on imaging services and sleep studies chose health care facilities with lower prices and incurred lower spending for imaging studies. Sinaiko notes that efforts to share cost information with the public are new and recommends “more targeted outreach at the time when the decision on where to go for care is most salient.” In her HCFO study, Sinaiko and colleagues evaluated the effects of the Aetna Member Payment Estimator, a web-based transparency tool that provides personalized, real-time, service-level estimates of consumer out-of-pocket and total costs for over 500 common, non-emergent services to Aetna enrollees.