PricingHealthcare.com Publishes Price Comparison Data for San Francisco Hospitals As Part of National Launch
American Fork, UT (PRWEB) August 06, 2013 -- Pricing Healthcare announces the launch of their web site for U.S. healthcare consumers. The Utah-based startup takes a unique approach to fixing the lack of transparency in healthcare prices. Although there is a growing amount of pricing data being made available by a few hospitals and government agencies, the data is often out-of-date and is usually limited to sticker prices that few people pay. It is also just a drop in the bucket. A wealth of useful pricing data, including insured rates and cash prices (primarily for the uninsured), is currently only publicly available on patient bills. That data source, scattered among tens of millions of households, is what the company is going after.
Crowd-sourcing is not a new phenomenon (think Wikipedia), but it has never been attempted in the world of healthcare bills on a large scale. Few ventures in crowd-sourcing could have as big an impact as this one. If successful, it would create an enormous database of healthcare prices, and not just for hospitals. Physicians’ offices, specialists, clinical labs, home health, surgical centers, and more all have prices that are almost completely hidden from consumers.
PricingHealthcare.com makes the process of entering data from your bill quick and easy, and completely anonymous. The company is equally concerned about making it easy to find and compare prices at facilities in a user's metropolitan area or "community." The aim of the site is to help both those with high-deductible plans as well as those without any insurance to find more affordable care.
Other consumer sites seem to only scratch the surface toward what the company calls the "tool of all tools" in healthcare price comparisons. Many sites do not provide facility-level details, or their prices are nothing more than very inaccurate estimates. Other sites ignore large segments of pricing data, or offer access only to narrow segments of the population. Pricing Healthcare is open to everyone, and is independent of any healthcare organization, insurer, or government entity.
Pricing Healthcare does not rely on crowd-sourced data alone. In conjunction with their release, the firm provides access to comparative data on 40 common procedures in the San Francisco area. Full access to the data is restricted to contributing members, but sample screens are available to guest visitors on the site. For communities where the amount of user-submitted data has not crossed a certain threshold, the San Francisco data shows what a more complete price comparison experience can be like at Pricing Healthcare.
With the site’s launch, millions of patients desperately searching for a way to lower their out-of-pocket costs no longer need to wait on the sidelines for a government solution. They can be actively involved in building a solution today, with each new data submission adding value for them and their neighbors. The communities with the most activity (in terms of user interest and data submissions) will also be the beneficiaries of additional resources from the company. The state of California is the company’s first target, due to a law requiring hospitals to publish their price lists annually.
PricingHealthcare.com is poised to pull back the curtain on healthcare pricing, letting consumers collectively expose the closely guarded pricing secrets of insurers and healthcare providers in their community. In turn, individual patients will not only be part of bringing desperately-needed transparency to healthcare pricing, but it will likely lead to true competition in healthcare, and as everyone in this country hopes, a significant reduction in healthcare prices.
For more information about the company, visit https://pricingHealthcare.com
Contact:
Randy Cox
Founder & CEO
801-855-6855
media(at)pricinghealthcare(dot)com
pricingHealthcare.com
Randy Cox, Pricing Healthcare, https://pricingHealthcare.com, 801-855-6855, [email protected]
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