South Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services has unveiled a new healthcare transparency website, offering digital tools state that officials hope will empower consumers and hold providers and health plans accountable.
Called SCHealthData.org, the website was created as part of a legislative mandate for the department to try to drive accountability and quality improvement in the Medicaid program and for chronically ill and uninsured residents.
In the first phase, launched in January, the site is offering data on hospital beds, occupancy rates, revenue, profits and losses, community health plans and needs assessments, with various mapping, graphing and comparison tools.
For instance, the site shows that average hospital aggregate profits increased 44 percent from 2011 to 2012 even as more than half of the facilities saw fewer bed-days, and that financial performance varied from surpluses of up to $159 million at McLeod Regional Medical Center and losses of as much as $20 million at another hospital in the McLeod system, the Loris Seacoast facility.
In a media release, DHHS director Tony Keck, a former manager at Johnson & Johnson and the Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, said the website "is an important step in the ongoing conversation about how we deliver and pay for care in our state and across the country, and how we can purchase the most health at the least cost."
The website was developed by Clemson University, which also operates the state's Medicaid information system. And it was designed in partnership with the South Carolina Hospital Association, a collaboration that may serve as a model for other states where similar transparency efforts have been met with some skepticism from hospital groups.
"Our state's hospital leaders believe that South Carolinians should have the information they need to understand the healthcare system and to make better decisions concerning their own healthcare," Thorton Kirby, president of the state hospital association, said in media release.
"However," he argued, "hospital costs make up only about one-third of total healthcare costs. Therefore, tracking similar cost data on other segments of the healthcare industry in South Carolina would provide a more complete understanding."
The department plans to add hospital pricing and charge information in the future, first with data from Medicare, Medicaid and the state employee health plan, and then perhaps private payers. Keck said another goal is to add information to let consumers compare hospital quality for common procedures and to incorporate data on other healthcare providers.
The department also wants to bring consumers new comparison tools in the future and build on a companion website offering data visualizations of disease prevalence (shown below), hospital and primary care access, and a health plan report card for Medicaid managed care organizations.