Officials at Spectrum Health, an integrated delivery network in Michigan, could probably give 10 persuasive reasons why putting healthcare prices on a hospital Web site is a bad idea.
Bad data. Hard to format it in a consumer-friendly way. Scary consequences for managed care contracts. The list is admittedly long.
That didn't stop them from doing it. The prices for its most common procedures were uploaded in mid-October.
"We felt the need to step up and make sure this information is available," said Mike Freed, executive vice president and CFO of Spectrum Health. "We don't know where consumerism is going, but if it is going to happen, pricing has to be more transparent, and pricing has to be accessible."
Freed admits the project to put prices online hasn't been without difficulties, but he said that's probably the worst reason for not doing something. "Part of the problem in our industry is that we don't start somewhere," he said. "I'm being self-critical here. There's a lot of fear and trepidation on this."
One example he offers: When the project got underway, he was a strong advocate for listing prices by procedure codes. In theory, the patient would get the CPT code from his or her physician, then look it up on the hospital Web site.
But Spectrum got a lot of pushback from physicians who feared it would require a change in their business processes. It also tested the code lookup system with focus groups consisting of members of the system's family advisory group.
"They didn't like it all," Freed said.
So his team designed an approach that permits consumers to browse among the system's top 50 inpatient and outpatient procedures, as well as many of its diagnostic procedures.
"We're not sure, frankly, if it is going to be used," Freed says of the posted data. "But we're taking a chance and saying, 'Let's try it.'"
One concern that may motivate hospitals to post prices is the possibility that if the industry doesn't do it voluntarily, the federal government may force its hand.
Danielle Lloyd, senior associate director of policy for the American Hospital Association, notes that the AMS recently published the prices it paid on 30 DRGs on its own Web site, broken down by county.
"It's just a giant Excel spreadsheet that 75 percent of Americans can't even download," she said. "It's not exactly what you would call user-friendly."
For instance, government statisticians used a red triangle to designate hospitals that had too few cases to provide comparable data. But most consumers saw the symbol as a warning sign, a mark of deficiency.
This is what happens, Lloyd said, when someone underestimates the complexity of posting prices to a Web site. "So much more needs to be done," she said.