The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Dear John,
In today’s newsletter we discuss a New Hampshire price transparency website and if increases in viewership impacted patients’ choice in services.
Increased Use Of Provider Price Tool Does Not Increase Use Of Lower-Price Providers
Many policy makers and payers view health care price transparency as critical to facilitating informed patient decision making and decreasing overall health care spending. In order for these savings to come about, patients must actually use available price information when choosing where to get care. Many states and private insurers have price transparency websites for this purpose.
In their March 2021 Health Affairs paper, Sunita M. Desai and coauthors discuss the impact of an online informational advertising campaign for NH HealthCost, the publicly available price transparency website developed by
the state of New Hampshire.
Desai and coauthors tracked the number of visits from New Hampshire users who viewed the price transparency components of the website and found the average number of visits per week to the website increased by 629 percent during the campaign. Despite this increase, the advertising campaign was not associated with greater use of lower-price services.
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Today on Health Affairs Blog, Matthew L. Tobey and coauthors argue that the time has come to organize stakeholders and define a pathway to more fully engage academic medical centers in equitable rural health. Also, Lawrence O. Gostin and Meryl Justin Chertoff discuss the principles and policy mechanisms that can be established to do better at protecting both liberty and public health during future emergencies.
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