CRS leadership had a recent presentation from a non-profit entity PriceCheck that is a collaboration between two public radio affiliates, KQED San Francisco and KPCC L.A., and Clear Health Costs, a for-profit company founded by a former NY Times health care reporter. PriceCheck is funded by a foundation grant and its purpose is to gather information from consumers/patients on the costs they incurred for common medical procedures under their insurance plans or on a cash basis. It also allows providers to voluntarily post their charges or cash prices for a service. They want to help consumers navigate the health care system and make sense of what may be widely divergent costs for services in different venues.

As you might expect their initial focus on common medical procedures includes services like mammography and MRI. They are sophisticated enough to gather price/charge information by CPT code and distinguish, for example, between a screening mammogram vs. diagnostic mammogram or MRI with or without contrast. It does allow patients to search by zip code and posts comments from consumers on their individual experience, i.e. provider gave me a cash price over the phone, chose service without billing my insurer because of high deductible.

We recognize that this type of cost comparison ignores issues of quality of equipment, radiologist, sub-specialization etc. By the same token we also recognize that with the ACA rollout, often with plans that have large co-pays for imaging, and the growth of high deductible plans that consumers are incentivized to shop for high end imaging procedures like CT, MRI or PET. It is an opportunity for radiology groups to make their services/costs available to consumers and highlight their quality, expertise and service components. Things like extended hours or Saturday appointments.

If you would like to review their site and what it currently contains you can go to http://blogs.kqed.org/stateofhealth/2014/06/23/share-your-bill-make-health-costs-transparent-in-california/ 

CRS will continue to dialogue with the sponsors about the ability to introduce more quality parameters for patient/consumer consideration and enhance the information that is provided via this site.