Next year, when Americans go looking for the best surgeon or cheapest MRI, many will have free access to a new comparison service started by three insurance giants.
Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare are partnering with the Health Care Cost Institute to build what they call "an online tool that will offer consumers the most comprehensive information about the price and quality of healthcare services."
With more than 65 million members between them, the move ups the ante in the battle for American healthcare transparency and could be a rival to the likes of Castlight Health, Health Sparq and other companies.
"Consumers, employers and regulatory agencies will now have a single source of consistent, transparent healthcare information based on the most reliable data available, including actual costs, which only insurers currently have," said David Newman, executive director of Health Care Cost Institute, a research nonprofit founded in 2011 by Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare.
The new tool will aggregate pricing data from commercial, Medicare Advantage and Medicaid health plans and offer comparisons in what they hope will be a usable online format for free (and without any of the three insurers' proprietary information). In the long-term they want to include fee-for-service Medicare and Medicaid payment data and recruit more insurers to share their data sets.
For consumers shopping around for health services, the tool is being designed to offer "comprehensive" cost data and quality information, and for employers it's designed to "foster more employee engagement in managing healthcare costs regardless of payer, health plan or plan design," the Institute said.
Price transparency pressures
At the state and nation level, the Institute and its backers are hoping the new data sets will inform market reviews, geographic premium regulations, and larger health policy decisions. The partnership also says providers will have a new source of pricing reference and business intelligence.
The need for more cost transparency especially has been growing for some time, driven in large part by employers and the approximately 15 million consumers with high-deductible plans who must cover several hundreds or thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for tests, treatments, surgeries and medications.
The collaborative decision by Aetna, Humana and United to open up their claims data comes as a number of startups have been offering price and quality price and quality comparison software for employers and payers -- Castlight Health, the first to go public and focused on large employers, HealthSparq, which serves many of the nation's Blue Cross plan members, Truven Health Analytics, ClearCost Health, Change Healthcare Corporation, and Healthcare Blue Book.
The Health Care Cost Institute expects to launch the portal in early 2015, in time for new members and the summer premium rating season.