A health plan work in progress: hospital-physician price and quality transparency.

Responding to large employers' interest in greater health care price and quality transparency, health plans are developing consumer tools to compare price and quality information across hospitals and physicians, but the tools' pervasiveness and usefulness are limited, according to findings from the Center for Studying Health System Change's (HSC) 2007 site visits to 12 nationally representative metropolitan communities. Many large employers view price and quality transparency as key to a broader consumerism strategy, where employees take more responsibility for medical costs, lifestyle choices and treatment decisions. Some health plans believe providing price and quality information to enrollees is a competitive advantage, while others are skeptical about the benefits and are proceeding cautiously to avoid potential unintended consequences. Health plans are in various stages of making price information available to enrollees. Plans generally provide some type of price information on inpatient and outpatient procedures and services from data based on their own negotiated prices or through aggregated health plan claims data obtained through a vendor; few plans provide price information on services in physician offices. However, the information provided often lacks specificity about individual providers, and its availability is often limited to enrollees in specific geographic areas. Health plans generally rely on third-party sources to package publicly available quality information instead of using information gleaned from their own claims or other data. Health plans' ability to advance price and quality comparison tools to the point where a critical mass of consumers trust and use the information to choose physicians and hospitals will likely have considerable influence on the ultimate success of broader health consumerism efforts.