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

A recent Physician’s Briefing [1] article discusses findings from a HCFO-funded study [2] from Anna Sinaiko, Harvard University, that found [3] that patients searching for prices on imaging services and sleep studies choose health care facilities with lower prices. In the study, Sinaiko and colleagues linked administrative enrollment and medical claims data to detailed search data to examine the impact of Aetna’s web-based, real-time, personalized episode-level price transparency tool on choice of health care facility for eight services. The authors note that, “Engaging patients with price information will be important to allow patients to better anticipate and plan their medical spending and to achieve a broad impact on health care spending.”