Findings from HCFO-Funded Work on Price Transparency Tool Featured by Several Media Outlets

As health care spending continues to grow, leaders in the field are looking for ways to reduce spending without sacrificing high-quality care. Price transparency is often viewed as one way to do this. As a recent Medical Xpress [1] article discusses, price information in combination with insurance benefits designed to share cost savings when patients choose low-cost health care facilities has been associated with lower spending. However, less is known about the impact of price information on patient choices for patients in commercial insurance plans without such benefit design incentives. The piece references findings from a HCFO-funded study [2] from Anna Sinaiko, Harvard University, that found [3] 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. The findings suggest that barriers remain to effective use of price transparency tools, but engaging patients with price information will be important to allow patients to better anticipate their medical expenditures and to achieve a broad impact on health care spending. Sinaiko also discusses the study in an interview with MedicalResearch.com [4].